fruit and nuts and eggs and birds, are better nourished than the
ground-roaming tribes; but that is not half the story. The tree mothers
cannot tuck their babies away in a lair and leave them; the tree babies
cannot begin early to scramble about, like little cubs--their dwelling
is too unsafe. There is nothing for it but the mother’s arms; the
baby must be held, and carried, and protected longer than the earth
babies. That was the handicap of the tree life, our ancestors might
have thought--the helpless babies. But, as we have seen in an earlier
chapter, it was that long, helpless babyhood that gave the brain its
chance to grow and made us human.
At eleven months old our little girl could stand alone as long as she
cared to, though perhaps it was not till the next month that she felt
altogether secure on her feet. She could climb up and down stairs with
perfect ease. She could walk held by one hand, but she did not care
to, and creeping was still her main means of getting anywhere.
Her understanding of speech had grown wonderfully, and as she was
docile in obeying directions, I could always find out whether she knew
a thing by name by saying, “Point to the rose,” or “Bring the book to
aunty,” and thus found it possible to make out a trustworthy list of
the words she knew: fifty-one names of people and things; twenty-eight
action words, which she proved she understood by obeying (“give” and
“sit down,” and the like), and a few adverbial expressions, like
“where” and “all gone”--eighty-four words in all, securely associated
with ideas. She understood them in simple combinations, too, such as,
“Bring mamma Ruth’s shoes;” and often, where she did not know all the
words in a sentence, she could guess quite shrewdly from those she did,
interpreting our movements vigilantly.
For her own speech, the small set of spoken words she owned was of
little use; indeed, as I have said, these were only exclamations.
For talking to us she used a wonderfully vivid and delicate language
of grunts, and cries, and movements. She would point to her father’s
hat, and beg till it was given her; then creep to him and offer the
hat, looking up urgently into his face, or perhaps would get to her
feet at his side and try to put it on his head; when he put it on, up
would go her little arms with pleading cries till he took her, and
then she would point to the door and coax to be carried outdoors. She
would offer a handkerchief with asking sounds when she wished to play
peekaboo; or a whistle, to be blown; or a top, to be spun. When she was
carried about the garden or taken driving, or when she crept exploring
and investigating about the rooms, she would keep up a most dramatic
running comment of interest, joy, inquiry, amusement, desire; and it
was remarkable what shades of approval and disapproval, assent, denial,
and request she could make perfectly clear.
XIII
WALKING ALONE; DEVELOPING INTELLIGENCE
And now our little girl was entered on the last month of the year--a
month of the most absorbing activity, yet perhaps rather in practicing
the powers she already had than in developing new ones. She added to
the list of words she understood till it was impossible to make record
of them all--new ones cropped up at every turn. She made the two small
additions to her spoken words that I have already mentioned. She
became perfectly secure in standing, and she was even more zealous to
climb than before, making nothing, in the latter part of the month, of
turning at the top of the stairs and sliding down, head first or feet
first, rarely needing for safety the vigilant arms that always hovered
ready to catch her.
For a time she made little advance towards walking, though she began
now to show some pleasure and pride in being led about by the hand.
But about the middle of the month the walking instinct seemed at
last to stir. The little one had often stepped from chair to chair,
keeping a hand on one till she had fairly hold of the other. If the
gap was an inch wider than she could cross thus, she dropped down and
crept. Now one day she looked at the tiny gap, let go her chair, stood
longingly, made a movement as if to take the single step, and dropped
ignominiously and crept; nor would she trust herself of her own accord
to movement on her feet (though once her mother did coax her a few
steps) for nearly a week. Then at last she ventured it.
I did not see the first exploit, but the next day I set her against the
wall and told her to walk, and she would step forward with much sense
of insecurity, tottering and taking tiny inches of steps, her legs
spreading more widely at each one, till I caught her in my arms. Once
I let her go as far as she could. She would not give up and sit down,
but went on as far as her legs would carry her, tremulous, pleased,
half afraid, half proud, and wholly conscious of doing something
remarkable; and when at the seventh step she subsided to the floor, she
was not in the least frightened, but got up readily and tottered on
another six steps.
The next day she had weakened, however, and for several days she would
not try again; and when she did try, she fell down after a single step.
She wanted to try again, and crept back to the wall, stood up, laughed,
waved her arms, made a false start, and could not quite find the
courage. In the four days that remained of her first year she sometimes
forgot herself and took a step or two; and she was perfectly able to
take half a dozen any time, strong and steady on her feet; but it was
not till shortly after the close of the year that she cast aside her
fears and suddenly was toddling everywhere.
It was about the middle of the twelfth month that the little one added
the useful sign of nodding to her means of communicating. She had been
taught to nod as a mere trick the month before, and took to it at once,
jerking her whole little body at every nod and priding herself mightily
on it. Perhaps because of this pride and pleasure, it became after a
time a sort of expression of approval: she greeted us with nodding
in sign of pleasure when we came in; she nodded like a mandarin when
she heard she was to go to ride. So now, when a pleasant suggestion
was made, “Would Ruth like a cracker?” “Does Ruth want to go see the
kitties?” her nod of approval soon passed into the meaning of assent;
indeed, it began now to be joined with the grunt of “Ĕ!” that I have
mentioned. She had a perfectly intelligible negative grunt, too, just
such as grumpy grown people use, out of the primitive stock of their
remotest ancestry, no doubt.
I was nearly taken in at one time by this cheerful nodding and “Ĕ!”
The little lady used them so intelligently when she was offered
something she wanted, and refused so consistently when offered what
she knew she did not want, that I began to set down any question as
understood if she said yes to it. But presently I had an inkling that
when she did not know whether she wanted it or not, she said yes, on
the chance--since most things prefaced by “Does Ruth want?” proved
pleasant. So I asked her alluringly, “Does Ruth want a course in higher
mathematics?”
The rosy baby looked at me gravely, waited with a considering air, as
she always did, taking it in, nodded gravely, and said decisively, “Ĕ!”
“Does Ruth want to go and be a missionary in Raratonga?”
“Ĕ!” with no less decision.
I saved her confidence in my good faith by substituting something
else as good, and more immediately practicable, for the mysterious
attractions I had offered, and used due caution thereafter in recording
her answers.
It was evident that in a primitive way the little one was comparing and
inferring not a little by this time. A week before, her grandmother
had told her which was O on a set of letter cards she played with, and
presently she showed Q with an inquiring cry: “What is this that looks
so much like O and yet is not O?” It may be added that she always knew
O afterwards, and picked up most of the other letters as easily--an
evidence of the unnecessarily hard work we make of learning the letters
by postponing them till the normal age of picking up the name of
anything and everything is past.
She was, of course, sometimes quaintly misled in an inference by lack
of knowledge. In the last week of the month I shut my eyes and asked
her, “Where are aunty’s eyes?” The baby tried in vain to find them
behind the lids, and then leaned over from my lap and looked carefully
for the lost eyes on the floor!
I hardly think that memory is much developed at this age; the
probability is that even the two year old remembers things only in
glimpses--one here and one there, but nothing continuous: this is one
of the great differences between his mind and ours. But our little
girl plainly remembered some things for days. In the second week of
the month her uncle showed her how he lifted the window sash, and four
days after, catching sight of the finger handle, she tugged at it with
impatient cries, trying to make the sash go up. A few days later,
having a flower in her hand when her feet were bare, she began, with a
sudden memory, to beg to have something done to her toes with it, and
it proved that two or three weeks before her mother had stuck a flower
between the fat toes.
All this month, even more than in the eleventh, she was incessantly
busy in exploring and learning. She opened boxes, took things out,
and put them back; worked with infinite diligence and seriousness at
such matters as getting a rubber ring off a notebook I had stretched it
round; investigated crannies, spaces under grates, doors ajar, with an
undying curiosity.
She began to imitate our actions more: she tried to comb her hair, to
put flowers into a vase, to mark on a paper with a pencil; she pulled
at her toes and muttered, as if she were saying the piggy rhyme.
She had a distinct idea as to what constituted herself, and when she
was asked, “Where is Ruth?” she did not indicate her whole body, but
always seized her head in her hands with certainty and decision.
She took delight in the new uses of mind and memory, no less than in
her bodily powers; she would recall the association of an object and
its name with joyous laughter, and her “Dă!” when she was asked to
point to something was a cry of pleasure.
She had not an atom of moral sense, nor the least capacity of
penitence or pity, but she was a friendly little thing, with no
worse tempers than a resentful whimpering when she was put into her
clothes--incumbrances that she much disliked. She was assiduous in
putting her crackers into her friends’ mouths, whether for fun or for
good-will; and it was not uncommon for her to throw herself, with
kisses and clinging arms, about our necks after we had given her
some specially valued pleasure, such as taking her outdoors. She was
learning to coax effectively with kisses, too, when she wished very
much to go.
And so the story of the swift, beautiful year is ended, and our wee,
soft, helpless baby had become this darling thing, beginning to
toddle, beginning to talk, full of a wide-awake baby intelligence, and
rejoicing in her mind and body; communicating with us in a vivid and
sufficient dialect, and overflowing with the sweet selfishness of baby
coaxings and baby gratitude. And at a year old, there is no shadow
on the charm from the perception that its end is near. By the second
birthday we say, “Ah, we shall be losing our baby soon!” But on the
first, we are eager, as the little one herself is, to push on to new
unfoldings; it is the high springtime of babyhood--perfect, satisfying,
beautiful.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.