What say the beeches, heart of my heart?
(Comrades we three!)
Wise in their canopied gallery of art--
Clear-visioned, true, in their cloisters apart
From the life which dwarfs when the soul is the mart
Of passions set free.
Write it, dear beeches--historian tree--
Write it for me.
My heart, it hath doubted; my soul, it hath slept.
Alone with the trees and the stars it hath wept,
Not knowing the mystery, not seeing the end--
Oh, be to it, beeches--calm beeches--its friend!
For part of the Infinite--you and the stars--
Sing it the Truth with your infinite bars.
The little leaves whisper'd, baby-voiced, low;
The finger-limbs wrote it 'mid starlighted glow:
"_Love and believe, and be kind as you go!_"
(O Heart, it is so!)
Why should you care for me to write of war and that last bloody fight,
now that I am at home again, and my heart in the melting? Is it because
it takes it all to make life, the melting, the June days, and the fight?
And why have I written all this, here, at The Home Stretch, months after
it has happened, with you coming, even as I write it, down the old sweet
path to me, in the old sweet way? Coming to see if I have finished my
letter to you. And I wrote it because but yesterday you said, "Jack,
dear, I want you to finish that letter you wrote me in the Philippines,
the one you wrote to _your love that was lost_. Finish it, Jack, this
one here at home for me, in our own home, _ours_, and _for your love
that was found!_"
And so I have done it, sweetheart.
*IV*
*THE BURGEONING*
"Now burgeons every maze of quick
About the flowering squares, and thick
By ashen roots the violets blow."
--Tennyson.
*CHAPTER I*
*TWO OF A KIND*
As I said at the beginning, this is my story, and the telling of it must
be in my own way. It does not satisfy me to end it with our
home-coming, and I hold that no story is complete unless it satisfies,
first of all, him who tells it.
Why should love stories end at the altar? For there is that in life
which surpasses the altar in sweetness. It is the hearth. And there is
that which is greater than love making. It is the home making. And
there are those in every marriage that is a marriage, of far greater
worth to the world--since only through them may the world's work go
on--than the two who joined their lives at the altar, and they are the
children who come of the marriage.
If my love for Eloise was great before, it is greater now, for in the
sweet years that have passed have I not proved it a thousand times, as
hath she, in the little things of life, the knight-errantries of love,
the battle and the gauge that tests us all daily? And are not the
still, calm depths in the eyes of the wife more satisfying to the soul
than the merry frothy shoals that gleam so riotously in the eyes of the
sweetheart?
No man has truly loved a woman until she has borne him children; not for
the child alone, uplifting as is the first sight of this tiny sweet seed
of the blossoming of their doubly growing souls, but as an evidence that
there is nothing worth while in the world except love, since not only
does it create every great, beautiful, sweet dream that has been given
to the world, but even the dreamer himself!
No man has loved until he has seen the child of his love. It is not the
row-boat of the calm waters that the sailor loves as his very life, but
the good ship of the mid-seas that holds fast and true, even in the
throes of the tempest, bringing him to port and to joy in the morning.
And so I have small respect, and a wholesome contempt for those
story-tellers who make of married love a marred love; who paint its
ending with the coming of children; and who would leave the wife at the
last page waiting for a lover's love lost in the husband's love.
I did not know at first what it was that made Eloise change that first
year, from the brilliant, riding, hunting, dancing Eloise of old to this
thoughtful, beautiful creature who wanted always to slip off and read
Keats by herself, and was slyly making what I thought were doll clothes
for Little Sister; and when I was most happy with her to see now and
then, through the day, little strange, unnatural flashes of sadness come
into her deep, thoughtful eyes, and little, queer, unsatisfying doubts
that would creep in. Unknowing, I would see her watching me; and it
would end at night in our own room with her in my lap in tears and her
arms around me.
"Jack! Jack!" she cried. "Oh, I am so foolish; but are you sure that
you will never love anybody better than you do me, not even your own
child?"
How well I remember that day of my greatest agony and blessing, and the
long, long hours in which her life hung in the balance. I remember the
good old doctor who came first, and then, as the day wore on, the
graveness that settled in his eyes and the hurried sending to the city
for another one. I walked sorrowfully among the trees, a coward, a
weakling, for the first time in my life.
Aunt Lucretia was my only comforter, and a stern, unflinching, rude
comforter she was. "Jack, _Colonel_ Ballington, actually wilted, a
weakling, ruined by matrimony and too much love, as I always said you'd
be, if you didn't look out. Jack, you make me tired; born on this stock
farm, seeing my crop of colts and calves, my spring lambs, too, and
whatnots; the finest and most high-bred matrons of my paddock, bringing
in their first borns and not a fool doctor in ten miles to meddle with
them and Nature and her ways! And now Eloise, the gamiest, nerviest,
bravest thoroughbred of them all! You make me tired! Come, I want to
make a man of you."
She seized my arm and led me into the house. In the library she took
down her huge silver goblet, an international trophy won in France, her
prize for the best merino wool, and then she led me down into the
cellar.
I had never been in it but once before. It was cool and damp, its
sleepers lined with cobwebs. She lit a lantern and led me into the
farthest, darkest, cobwebbiest corner. She stood before a small
ten-gallon cask, and said with some show of grim humor, "Jack, it was
fifteen years ago to-day--Did you know this was an anniversary? Well,
fifteen years ago to-day I brought Eloise here, adopted her and gave her
to you; and that day I told my old friend, Jack Daniel, to send me this
ten-gallon cask of pure whiskey, to be put away, and to get good and
mellow for just what I knew would one day happen--the first colt! And
now we are going to tap it in his honor!"
"_His_ honor, Aunt Lucretia?" I said shamedly. "I had set my heart on
her being a--a--why, we are going to name her Lucretia," I added timidly
and with some confusion.
"Jack, you were always a fool; a bigger one since you married, just as I
knew you'd be, all of 'em are. Why, of course he'll be a good lusty
chap; and I have already named him _Andrew Jackson_, and that's what
he'll be, name and all. I am going to give his daddy a drink; he needs
it, weak-kneeing around here like an old run-down selling-plater in the
home stretch."
In the dining-room she took down a cut-glass goblet and pottered around
in the side-board till she had found her old-time loaf sugar. This she
broke into bits, and, putting a piece in the goblet, she held it up to
the light and eyed me queerly.
I knew Aunt Lucretia, and that this ceremony was her way of playing for
time and a kindly way of diverting my mind from Eloise.
"Very few people, Jack," she went on, "know how to make a toddy. Now
you pour a little water over this sugar and let it melt; if you crush it
with the spoon it spoils the whole thing, and then pour the whiskey in
slowly, stirring it all the time. The nutmeg; ah--"
We took one each, and Aunt Lucretia smiled. "Feel better? Well, you'd
better stop at that! Another one might make you see
double--directly--and that would be horrible--twins! Why, Jack, I've
known men to be driving along, single, and after taking two of these to
swear they were driving a span! One more makes them think they are
holding a four-in-hand! Now, that boy of yours," she began, "why, Jack,
I wouldn't have him divided up into twins for anything."
We stopped and looked quickly up. The old doctor was smiling at us. He
had slipped into the room while we were talking.
"You have missed it, Miss Lucretia," he said, pouring out a half-glass
for himself and taking it straight. "Phew! But I need a bracer myself
after all that! It's a girl, Jack, a most beautiful, bloodlike little
girl."
"Jack!" cried my Aunt, throwing up both hands, "Jack, get out of my
sight! But we'll drink to her," she added gamely.
And we did.
"Two of them!" cried the doctor, warmly shaking my hand. "Two beautiful
little girls, Jack! My boy, I congratulate you! And the mother is
doing fine, just tickled to death and begging me to let you come in at
once!"
"Heaven help us!" cried my Aunt Lucretia, with feigned anger, but real
exultation shining in her eyes. "Twin colts never amount to a hill of
beans. We'll go in directly, Doctor, and drown one of them; it will
give the other a chance in life."
I turned quickly. "Hand me that glass, Doctor," I said firmly. "I am
never going to be partial to my little ones. We've drunk to the first
one, here's to the second!"
"Yes, even in our disappointment let us be just," said my Aunt, joining
me.
And we drank to the second one, my Aunt laughing, pleased for all her
seeming anger.
But my own heart was pounding under me with the same gripping in my
throat that I had felt as I stood on the deck of the Indiana and,
looking up, beheld Old Glory above me....
They were lying together by their mother, pink and white little
creatures, with heads quite hairless, and blue eyes that were already
smiling as plain as could be, twinkling, fun-loving eyes, which said,
then, as they have always said, "_It's a joke on Daddy we've played!_"
Eloise, lying smiling by them, was holding out her arms to me. "I am
quite comfortable, and oh, so happy, Jack!" she whispered as I kissed
her again and again. "You can't love them both better than you do me!
And please don't inspect them too closely, Daddy," she went on, "for you
know what old Josh Billings said: '_There is two things no man is ever
prepared for--twins!_' So we've had to dress up one of them in Aunt
Lucretia's old flannel skirt and a crash towel, but she's just as sweet
as the other one and so like her own, sweet daddy!"
"That Jack Daniel whiskey, sweetheart," I said, choking up
sillily,--"but I am so thankful, now that you are safe--and--and--I was
so proud and happy that I drank to each of their healths, till, Eloise,
really are you sure, but I'll swear I am seeing four little heads here
under the cover--and if there are--of course, if it is, it's all right
with me--and--and--Eloise, aren't they holding hands already?"
Eloise broke out into her old laugh. "Of course they are," she cried
happily, "and there aren't but two of them, Jack; honest, just two--on
my word of honor, none of them have got away; but that's the funniest
part of it all--they clasped hands as soon as they were placed
together--just two sweet for anything! Such devotion to each other!
Look! And oh, Jack, you must never, never show any partiality, or love
one more than the other, or either of them more than me. And don't take
any more of Aunt Lucretia's Jack Daniel, for it makes me afraid to have
you see double this way! Don't now, for if you took two more of those
old drinks you might see triplets--oh,--the thought of it! Now kiss us
all goodnight; we want to sleep. And here--your hands, Jack, and our
little prayer."
*CHAPTER II*
*HOW AUNT LUCRETIA RAN AWAY*
There never was a fall like Aunt Lucretia's when she did fall in love.
It is historic at The Home Stretch to this day, and the record is as
Aunt Lucretia wrote it to me after she had married Dr. Gottlieb.
"Ran away!" exclaimed Eloise, after she had read the letter; "and
everybody on the place has been trying to marry them off to each other
for twenty years. But of course Aunt Lucretia had to do something
different!"
"Of course, I knew, Jack," wrote Aunt Lucretia from Dr. Gottlieb's old
home in Germany, where they were spending their honeymoon, "that old
Gott,--bless the dear heart of him!--had been loving me all these years.
Women folks have a kind of a dog nose for the man that really loves
them--they know it by instinct. There are some men who court women
naturally, but there are lots of them every sensible woman has to court
a little herself. Old Gott was one of these. I knew if I ever married
him I'd have to court him myself, although he was crazy about me. But I
didn't love him then; he was so silly and made me so mad the way he did
it--always hinting around that I was that great red flower he was trying
to find, and writing me silly letters, begging me to kiss the postage
stamp when I replied, so he might kiss it also! Of course I was proud
of Gott and awfully fond of him. I knew he had a great mind and an
international reputation as a botanist, but as a lover, Jack, he was
very poor.
"He courted me every way but the right way. Now there is only one way to
court a woman and that is to kiss her. You can get some of them to
marry you the other way--that is, by making them think they are little
tin goddesses, or stars 'way up above you, and all that, or by writing
them poetry and not daring to look at them except through a
long-distance telescope!
"After five or six years and an innumerable number of family prayers and
pink teas you can get that kind to wed you. But she isn't worth much
after you win her; for you get a little pink-tea wife who presents you,
in the course of the first ten years, with one little offspring, and
devotes the rest of her time to pills and hospital operations for
appendicitis. Instead of going in for addition they go in for
subtraction, Jack."
"Well, Jack, after you and Eloise married, I began to feel lonesome, and
I felt sorry for poor old Gott, pottering around out there among his
books and flowers, with nobody to take care of him. I used to ride by
to see him every day, thinking maybe he'd have sense enough to court me
in a decent way; but every time he would act worse, until it got so that
the poor man couldn't talk at all in my presence; he could only fold his
hands and sigh.
"I knew the disease was running its course, and I became very uneasy.
In this stage the patient, in addition to all the previous symptoms, has
a steady rising temperature and becomes mentally unbalanced. This is
shown in intense jealousy, a disease of mind produced by nothing else in
the world but this malady. This hallucination takes violent possession
of the mind, so that he is ready to shoot, kill or stab anyone whom he
thinks stands in the way of his one great love; or, failing in that, to
kill himself on the slightest provocation. It makes them do all kinds
of queer things.
"And he rapidly developed into the last stage, which is complete
imbecility.
"There was nothing for me to do, Jack; I must save poor Gott's life and
mind. It would be hard on me, I knew, but for thirty years I had taken
care of him, even giving him a home; and I could not bear to see the
poor man, in his old age, become an imbecile and a suicide for want of a
little help from me.
"As he was practically an imbecile already I decided to treat him as
such; to cajole him, to entrap him, to lead him into matrimony by making
him think it was something beautiful, and enchanting, 'up a winding
stair,' so to speak; a hot house at the end of a rainbow!
"And this is the way it happened: I first hunted up that old red flower
and pinned it over my heart. Then I took a flask of Tennessee whiskey
in my saddle-bag and rode over to his house.
"I caught him just right. He had been up all night, writing a thesis
for the University of Berlin on the 'Propagation of Pollen by
Differentiation,' and having finished that, he was beginning to tell his
pet parrot how much I resembled that great, red flower he was so fond
of, and talking about the evening star which he said was just rising.
It was ten o'clock in the morning and I knew at once what had happened.
He had begun his thesis the afternoon before, and had become so absorbed
that he had worked all night without knowing it, and now thought it was
tea time!
"I was greatly distressed at the inroads the disease had made in his
mind, and I knew I must act with the greatest tact and foresight. He
was just telling the parrot all the beautiful things about me and my
resemblance to the red flower when I walked in, wearing the flower over
my heart.
"He gave one look at me and the flower, and that was almost too much for
him. He began to mumble something, and then became speechless in his
chair.
"I was almost heartbroken to see the swift inroads the disease had made
on him, poor dear.
"'Gott,' I said gently, sitting down by him, 'you must take a little of
this,' and I made him drink a good stiff toddy.
"He drank it, looking bewilderingly around, like the poor inmates of the
insane asylum I have seen, and every now and then looking at the red
lily and sighing as if in great pain.
"At last he spoke. 'Er--Miss--Miss--er'--
"'Lucretia,' I said, smiling encouragingly at him; 'just Lucretia
always, dear Gott, between you and me!'
"This would have landed any sensible man, but thirty years of the
disease had made Gott abnormal.
"Again I saw the color leave his cheek, and his face turn pale. Another
good bracer, and he was better.
"'As I was just going to remark,' he said, turning pale again,
'Lu--Lu--Lu--ere--' he stammered.
"'Lucretia,' I said. 'Of course, Gott, dear heart, dear heart, that is
my name--your name for me.'
"He tried to faint again, but the Tennessee whiskey stood staunch. So
he threw up his hands with a little happy, pitiful gesture, and again
lost his voice!
"After awhile I said to him: 'I am going to scold you, dear Gott; I am
going to take better care of you. You have been sitting up all night
writing and you are tired.'
"'Oh, no,' he said; 'oh, no. I began to write a few hours ago. It is
now tea time. Won't you take tea with me?'
"Jack, it was pitiful. I thought I'd take him in my arms and kiss him
then and there--just make him my own--only I was afraid the shock might
kill him! I must do it gradually. So I went on humoring him. 'Sure,
Gott, dear, old, precious Gott,' I said. 'Sure, it is just tea time,
and I'm going to sit out on the little porch under the wisteria vine and
the stars. Won't you come with me, precious?'
"Jack, it proved near being fatal. He tried to speak, but had only a
kind of a gurgling spasm of a breath, panted violently, and turned red.
"I let that soak in and got up and got busy. I thought if anything in
the world would fetch him, or any man, it would be to see a good-looking
woman, in a white apron, with rosy cheeks and eyes full of fun, buzzing
around in his old bachelor's den getting him a meal that was worth
while.
"Poor old Gott! The disease of thirty years' standing had nearly ruined
him!
"I cooked him one of my famous steaks, Jack; you know how. Skillet red
hot, a little butter on it, then drop the steak on, and, as quick as it
sears on that side, over it goes on the other, and quick again back, and
so on, holding the juice in rich and sweet. And the tea, Jack, the rare
old china I had brought in my saddle-bags, too; and the omelet; if
anything in the world would put heart into a man!
"Eat it? You should have seen the dear old sweetheart. It almost made
me cry. God only knows when he'd had a meal before. I found out
afterwards that he had been writing two days, Jack, and then thought
every day was to-morrow!
"He was so near gone, you may judge of it yourself. After those two
toddies and that good meal he--he--well, he didn't seem to catch on yet!
His mind didn't seem to be any clearer. But it helped him, for he had
courage enough to take my hand in his, and say, 'Lucretia, shall we sit
out under the wisteria--and--and--look at the moon?'
"'I said _spoon_,' I replied firmly, for I saw then, Jack, that I must
be very gentle and firm with Gott, he was so badly afflicted!
"I felt his hand quiver beneath mine. He tried to faint, but very
firmly I led him out into the full daylight under the wisteria vine.
And then very gently but firmly I began to woo him; poor dear, he was
nearly gone!
"He looked so killing, too, Jack; the little fellow with his gray hair,
his handsome, red face, the fine turn of his large, intellectual head!
Oh, that horrid disease! For he sat there in broad daylight mistaking
the sun for the moon, and the little white jasmine blossoms above us for
stars! I thought the best way to win him would be through the red lily
he had worshipped so long. So, after sitting by him and taking his hand
in mine, I said, 'Dear heart, do you notice what flower I am wearing
to-day?'
"Imagine my exasperation when he stammered, shook all over, and began
mechanically, 'Yes, madam, it is the _Lilium Philadelphium_, the red,
wood, flame, or Philadelphia Lily. Flowers: erect, tawny, or
red-tinted, outside: vermilion or sometimes reddish orange, and spotted
with madder brown within; one to five on separate peduncles, borne at
the summit. Periant of six distincts, spreading spatulate segments,
each narrowing into a claw and with a nectar groove at the base: six
stamens: one style; the club-shaped stigma three-lobed. Stem: one to
three feet tall, from a bulb composed of narrow jointed fleshy scales.
Leaves: in whorls of threes to eights, lance-shaped, sealed at intervals
on the stem. Preferred habitat: dry-woods, sandy soil, borders and
thickets; flower season, June and July; distribution, Northern border
United States and westward to Ontario, south to the Carolinas and
Virginia!'
"He said it all like a parrot, looking up at the wisteria vine. Jack, I
saw that I must fight hard to save him. 'Dear heart,' I said, holding
his hand, 'don't you think you need someone always with you to take care
of you, cook your meals, nurse you? I fear you are sick now, darling,'
I added, laying my head on his bosom.
"I could feel his heart panting like a trip-hammer. I saw him wince,
struggle, grit his teeth, as one who tries to overcome a terrible thing,
fighting for mastery of his mind; and then, Jack--I was so mad I could
have choked him! That terrible disease!
"'Yes--Lucretia--dear--Miss--er--Miss Lucretia, I mean--do you think I
could hire some good old woman who--ah--whom would you suggest?'
"'I could suggest a great many, Gott, I said, my arm around him; 'but I
will suggest only one. _I_ need a husband for my old age, and _you_,' I
said, 'darling,' and I put one arm around his neck.
"He shivered, paled, and I thought he was dying; but I went on,
'Gott--you dear, old Gott--I have loved you a long time, but I've been
too busy to tell you so; but now, dear sweetheart, I want to make you my
wife--I mean, Gott, my husband, of course, and--and--kiss me, Gott; kiss
me, dearie!'
"Oh, Jack, the divinity of it! I am ashamed of all I have said before!
Tear down that pedigree from your wall! Forget all I've said about
marrying people off like animals--about improving the breed--about
anything but love--love--love. For, when my lips touched his, life grew
different! I had never felt it before! From that moment I was in
love--divinely, gloriously in love!
"He keeled over, of course. It all but killed him. It was the crisis
of the disease of thirty years' standing, but I had my nerve with me,
and when he came to he was so bashful and happy, Jack. He said shyly,
'But, darling Lucretia, don't you think our parents might object;
wouldn't it be romantic if we ran away?'
"And we did, Jack, that very night. I had him put a ladder up to his
bed room window, and that night I slipped out, brought him down the
ladder, and we ran off to town and were married!
"Oh, it was so romantic, such a sweet dream! And here we are in his old
home in Germany and so happy!
"Forgive and forget all that I have ever said about people falling in
love, for mine at last was the hardest fall!"
*CHAPTER III*
*A NIGHT WITH CAPTAIN SKIPPER*
Blessed is that man who is born with the saving grace of humor!
Blessings on the memory of my Celtic sires!
One night when Eloise and the twins were away, I rode over to spend the
night with my brother Ned. He had been elected to Congress from the
Hermitage District, and together we were to frame a Forestry Bill--the
first of that series of acts which have steadily legislated toward the
Conservation of our national resources, and which will yet lead on to
greater things; first and foremost of which, and most vital, will be the
taking over for preservation by the national Government of the entire
Appalachian mountain range, the forests of which are at the headwaters
of nearly all the Eastern half of our country.
My brother was not home, but the others were, and to my great delight a
girl baby as much like her mother as two turquoise shells. Little
Sister had grown into a slim, pretty girl, and Captain Skipper, more
positive than ever, began early begging his mother, since his father was
away, to let him sleep with his Uncle Jack that night.
"Oh, do, Thesis," I said, after supper. "Let him have his way."
"And that's where you'll drop your candy," said Little Sister in her
serio-quaint way.
Thesis, who is so good that she says only what she thinks and is so
honest that she never suspects others of diplomatic pretenses, took me
at my word. Captain Skipper should sleep with his dear Uncle Jack that
night!
You who read this, did you ever sleep with a boy? I don't mean one of
those good boys that you read of in Sunday-school books--the impossible
kind--who lives like a saint every day and says his prayers and retires
like a gentleman at night: but one of those lusty, growing young devils,
born with a spring in his back, who howls out the first year, sleeps out
the second, and by the time of the third is ready to chase the cat
around and fight brave battles with the hen folks. At four he is ready
for the birds' nests and tin cans for the dogs' tails, and a little
later he breaks every colt that tries to keep the Sabbath in the meadow
by the still waters.
When night comes--ay, there is the rub! He howls away the twilight
hours and spends the night kicking, coughing, rolling out of bed or
having fits, and yet sleeping through it all like a cub in winter
quarters.
The weather that night was warm, one of those hot April nights that lies
humid and close. "The dear little fellow will be so proud to sleep with
his Uncle Jack," said his fond mother, when she kissed him good night;
"and he does sleep so sound and quietly."
Never having owned a boy, I believed all of this. Did you ever try to
undress a lad of four that had chased the cat around until he was hot?
His clothes stick to him like a plaster. Being a novice, I got
everything unbuttoned and then skinned him, peeled them off. To my
surprise--and I found later that there were all kinds of surprises in
that boy--in fact, that he was made out of surprises--he insisted upon
saying his prayers! But I never saw anything go more promptly to sleep
at his devotions. I had to derrick him up into the bed.
One of the strange things about a boy is that when he starts to wiggle
around over the bed in his sleep he does it diagonally. I pulled him
back on his own side of the bed five times within the next hour. Then I
would hear him scuffling and flopping about, always ending in a
long-drawn, dismal and dreary sigh, that would have made his fortune as
Romeo. It always ended in his rounding up against the footboard in the
opposite corner, flat on his back, each limb and arm pointing to its own
cardinal point of the compass, his nightgown rolled up in a wad under
his neck, and his body looking like that of a young bull frog in a
Kentucky horse-pond.
If there is anything more absurd than a boy in this attitude I have
never seen it. I tried to awaken him and get him back, but he only
sighed one of those long sighs, unlimbered and slept on. I went back to
my window and began to work on my bill, but my thoughts were soon
dispelled with a start. I heard a choking, gasping, frightfully
suffocating sound, mingled with a dolorous wheezing:
"_O-woo,--oo--oo--wow--O-woo--oo!_"
I was at his side in an instant, this time frightened. He was sitting
stolidly up in bed, a strange gaze in his wide-open eyes, his face
beaded with a clammy moisture, his face drawn in a spasm. I had seen a
boy have a fit before and I went upstairs after his mother, two jumps at
a time.
"Quick," I cried, "hurry down! He'll not live until we can get the
doctor!"
She was rocking the baby to sleep. She did not become excited, but
smiled and whispered, "He isn't dying, Jack, it is just poor
circulation. Don't notice him at all."
This made me cynical, bitter.
"Poor circulation?" I said in disgust. "He has the best circulation I
ever saw; he has circulated all over that bed three times already. Not
notice him? It would take the mental aberration of a stone man to do
it."
I fear I was a bit satirical, for it is not pleasant to be made a
laughing stock of by a boy who was not even awake. I was not assured,
however, and half expected to find him dead when I got back. But I was
disappointed. He had flopped across his pillow on his back, his arms
and legs curled up. And sleeping! No ground-hog in mid-winter ever
surpassed it.
I spent the next hour planning how I would like to fix him so as to keep
him on his side of the bed and let me go to sleep. In fact, I quit
everything else and thought. If there is anything I like to do it is to
sleep when the time comes. These are some of the stunts that boy did in
that hour: Fits, three;--very distinct and prolonged: snorts,--one every
ten minutes: choking spells, at intervals: kicked the pitcher off of the
table near the bed twice: jumped up and talked perfectly naturally--so
naturally that I felt that he was awake,--but he was not. More snorts;
and then: "_Catch him! There he goes in that hole--hooray!_"
I would have sworn then that he was awake, and examined him closely,
cuffing and shaking him. But he was not. He sighed and slept on....
The brilliant plan I finally settled on was to put the pillows between
us. It was nearly midnight before I had courage enough to retire at
all. I pulled him up on his side, straightened him out and put the
barrier between us, and then crept gingerly in. I lay still for a while
listening. My success was so complete I wanted to stay awake a while
and enjoy it. He would start out on his journey across the bed, but
would wind up suddenly against my barricade. There he would lie a
while, and I could feel his thumps against it.
In my vanity I chuckled.
I had dozed off in this state of self-conceit when I felt something
rammed into my mouth. I thought at first that burglars had entered and
that I had been chloroformed and gagged. It was not so. That boy had
shot his foot through under the pillow and popped me square in the
mouth. I had been told that it was not well to sleep with one's mouth
open--now I knew it.
When people treat me that way, asleep or awake, I resent it. I fight.
I boxed that boy's ears. I pounded his head against the headboard so
that I would awaken him. I shook him, kicked him, and used words I
should not have wished his mother to hear. When I had finished, he
quietly sighed another of his long, peaceful, happy sighs, and slept on.
Sleep was not for me after that, and I spent the next hour lying awake
and cataloguing the different things he would do. These were only a few
of them:--Another fit; seeing cats, and wolves and dragons around his
bed; chasing rabbits; talking in his sleep; telling of seeing a bear
ride a bicycle down the pike; breaking a colt; swimming in the creek;
fighting another boy; wheezing and thumping and making strange noises;
dreaming he was an infant again and imbibing from an imaginary bottle;
smacking his lips so loud that the noise could be heard all over the
house.
It was three o'clock before a bright idea entered into my head. I
remembered that the only request that his mother had made of me was to
see that he did not fall out of bed. I remembered that in all his
circulations and maneuverings, this was the one thing that he never did,
like a runaway mule he knew how to take care of himself even in his
sleep. I began to anticipate him. I determined to humor some of his
little whims. I put a pitcher of ice water by the bed. I got a link of
the garden hose that felt clammy and looked like a snake. I doubled up
my pillow so I could strike hard with it. Then I sat up and waited. I
would make him realize all he dreamed.
I did not have long to wait. This time he was falling from a tree or
down an endless precipice, for he sat on the edge of the bed, yelling:
"Catch me--catch me--I'm falling!"
I let him fall. In fact I helped him along. I put a lot of force into
that pillow and it caught him squarely under the ear. He went out of
the bed, hitting the floor in a heap. It wakened him. "Where am I,
mamma? O, mamma?" he called.
"Come to your mamma," I said softly; "dear little boy, you have fallen
out of the bed. Be careful how you roll."
He was asleep before he touched the pillow. But in the next half hour he
did not roll any more, and so I learned that a boy may be taught things
even in his sleep if only the proper implements are used.
But he was not yet cured of swimming in his sleep, for, just as I began
to doze off, thinking that he was properly broken, he began to splash
around in the bed, lamming me on the head and stomach, and shouting:
"Look out! There's a snake--pull for the shore!"
This gave me my cue. Seizing a water pitcher I turned it over on him,
at the same time wrapping the clumsy hose around his leg.
"Snakes," I cried in his ear, "dive for the shore!"
He gave a wide-awake yell that time, and rolled backward out of bed.
One jump and he had cleared the room, going up stairs yelling: "Snakes,
mamma, s-n-a-k-e-s!"