I
I had been talking rather loosely about the bringing-up of children. They had been lately appearing to me in the guise of infinitely prevalent little beings who impressed themselves almost too vividly upon one’s consciousness. My summer vacation I had passed in a household where a vivacious little boy of two years and a solemn little boy of six months had turned their mother into a household slave. I had seen walks, conversations, luncheons, and all the amenities of summer civilized life, shot to pieces by the indomitable need of imperious little children to be taken care of. Little boys who came running at you smiling, stubbed their toes, and were instantly transformed into wailing inconsolables; babies who woke importunately at ten o’clock in the evening, and had to be brought down warm and blinking before the fire; human beings who were not self-regulating, but to whom every hard surface, every protuberance, was a menace to happiness, and in whom every want and sensation was an order and claim upon somebody else—these were new offerings to my smooth and independent existence. They interested and perturbed me.
The older little boy, with his sunny luxuriance of hair and cheek, was always on the point of saying something novel and disconcerting. The baby, with his deep black eyes, seemed to be waiting silently and in soft anticipation for life. He would look at you so calmly and yet so eagerly, and give you a pleasant satisfaction that just your mere presence, your form, your movement, were etching new little lines on his cortex, sending new little shoots of feeling through his nerves. You were being part of his education just by letting his consciousness look at you. I liked particularly to hold my watch to his ear, and see the sudden grave concentration of his face, as he called all his mind to the judgment of this arresting phenomenon. I would love to accost him as he lay murmuring in his carriage, and to check his little breakings into tears by quick movements of my hands. He would watch me intently for a while until the fact of his little restless woe would come upon him again. I was challenged then to something more startling, and the woe would disappear in little short gasps. But I would find that he was subject to the law of diminishing returns. The moment would arrive when the woe submerged everything in a wail, and his mother would have to be called to nurse or coddle him in the magical motherly way.
The baby I found perhaps more interesting than his little brother, for the baby’s moods had more style to them. The brother could be transformed from golden prattlingness to raging storm, with the most disconcerting quickness. He could want the most irrational things with an intensity that got itself expressed in hypnotic reiteration. Some smoldering will-to-power in one’s self told one that a child should never be given the thing that he most wanted; and yet in five minutes one would have given him one’s soul, to be rid of the brazen rod which he pounded through one. But I could not keep away from him. He and his baby brother absorbed me, and when I contemplated their mother’s life, I had many a solemn sense of the arduousness of being a parent. I thought of the long years ahead of them, and the incalculability of their manifestations. I shuddered and remained, gloating, I am afraid, a little over the opportunity of enjoyment without responsibility.
All these things I was recounting the other evening after dinner to a group of friends who professionally look after the minds and bodies of the neglected. I was explaining my absorption, and the perils and merciless tyranny of the mother’s life, and my thankfulness at having been so much in, and yet so much not of, the child-world. I was not responsible, and the policeman mother could be called in at any time to soothe or to quell. I could always maintain the amused aloofness which is my usual attitude toward children. And I made the point that parenthood must become less arduous after the child is a self-regulating little organism, and can be trusted not to commit suicide inadvertently over every threshold, can feed himself, dress himself, and take himself reasonably around. I even suggested unwarily that after five or six the tyranny was much mitigated.
There was strong dissent. Just at that age, I was told, the real responsibilities began. I was living in a fool’s paradise of bachelordom if I thought that at six children were grown-up. One of the women before the fire made it her business to get children adopted. I had a sense of foreboding before she spoke. She promptly confirmed my intuition by offering to endow me with an infant of six years, for a day or for as long as I would take him. The hearty agreement of the rest amazed and alarmed me. They seemed delighted at the thought of my becoming parent for a day. I should have Ernest. They all knew Ernest; and I should have him. They seemed to have no concern that he would not survive my brief parenthood. It rather warmed and flattered me to think that they trusted me.
I had a sense of being caught in an inescapable net, prisoner of my own theories. If children of six were no longer tyrants, the possession of Ernest would not interfere with my work or my life. I had spoken confidently. I had a reputation among my friends of speaking eloquently about “the child.” And I always find it almost impossible to resist the offer of new experience. I hesitated and was lost. I even found myself naming the day for Ernest’s momentary adoption. And during all that week I found it increasingly impossible to forget him. The night before Ernest was to come I told myself that I could not believe that this perilous thing was about to happen to me. I made no preparations to receive Ernest in my tiny bachelor apartment. I felt that I was in the hands of fate.