II
I was not really surprised when fate knocked at the door next morning in the person of my grinning friend, and swiftly left a well-bundled little boy with me. I have rarely seen a young woman look as maliciously happy as did his guide when she left, with the remark that she couldn’t possibly come for Ernest that evening, but would take him at nine o’clock on the morrow. My first quick resentment was stilled by the thought that perhaps an official day was a day plus a night. But Ernest loomed formidably at me. There would be problems of sleeping. Was I a victim? Well, that is what parents were! They should not find me weak.
Ernest expressed no aversion to staying with me. He was cheerful, a little embarrassed, incurious. The removal of his hat disclosed a Dutch-cut of yellow hair, blue eyes, many little freckles, and an expression of slightly quizzical good-humor. I really had not had the least conception how big a boy of six was likely to be, and I found comfort in the evidence that he was big enough to be self-regulating, and yet deliciously small enough to be watched over. He could be played with, and without danger of breaking him.
Ernest sat passively on a chair and surveyed the room. I had thought a little pedantically of exposing him to some Montessori apparatus. I had got nothing, however. The room suddenly became very inane; the piano a huge packing-box, the bookcases offensive, idiotic shelves. A silly room to live in! A room practically useless for these new and major purposes of life. I was ashamed of my surroundings, for I felt that Ernest was surveying me with contempt and reproach.
It suddenly seemed as if little boys must like to look at pictures. Ernest had clambered up into a big chair, and was sitting flattened against its back, his legs sticking straight out in front of him, and a look of mild lassitude on his face. He took with some alacrity the illustrated newspaper supplement which I gave him, but my conscience tortured me a little as to whether his interest was the desperate one of demanding something for his mind to feed on, however arid it might be, or whether it was a genuine æsthetic response. He gave all the pictures exactly the same amount of time, rubbing his hand over each to make sure that it was flat, and he showed no desire to talk about anything he had seen. Since most of the pictures were of war, my pacifist spirit rebelled against dwelling on them. His celerity dismayed me. It became necessary to find more pictures. I had a sudden horror of an afternoon of picture-books, each devoured in increasingly accelerated fashion. How stupid seemed my rows of dully printed books! Not one of them could disgorge a picture, no matter how hard you shook it. Despair seized me when I found only a German handbook of Greek sculpture, and another of Michelangelo. In hopeful trepidation I began on them. I wondered how long they would last.
It was clearly an unfamiliar field to Ernest. My attempts to test his classical knowledge were a failure. He recognized the Greeks as men and women, but not as gods, and there were moments when I was afraid he felt their nudity as indecent. He insisted on calling the Winged Victory an angel. There had evidently been religion in Ernest’s career. I told him that these were pictures of marble statues from Greece, of gods and things, and I hurriedly sketched such myths as I could remember in an attempt to overtake Ernest’s headlong rush of interest. But he did not seem to listen, and he ended by calling every flowing female form an angel. He laughed greatly at their missing arms and heads. I do not think I quite impressed him with the Greek spirit.
On Michelangelo there was chance to test his Biblical background. He proved never to have heard of David, and took the story I told him with a little amused and incredulous chortle. Moses was new to him, and I could not make him feel the majesty of the horns and beard. When we came to the Sistine I felt the constraint of theology. Should I point out to him God and Adam and Eve, and so perhaps fix in his infant mind an ineradicable theological bias? Now I understand the temptation which every parent must suffer, to dose his child with easy mythology. Something urged me to say, Adam was the first man and Eve was the first woman, and get the vague glow of having imparted godly information. But I am glad that I had the strength sternly to refrain, hoping that Ernest was too intellectually robust to be trifled with. I confined myself to pointing out the sweep of clouds, the majesty of the prophets, the cracks in the plaster, the mighty forms of the sibyls.
But with my last sibyl I was trapped. It smote my thought that there were no more pictures. And Ernest’s passivity had changed. We were sitting on the floor, and his limbs began to take on movement. He crawled about, and I thought began to look menacingly at movable objects on tables. My phobia of the combination of movable objects and children returned. Parenthood suddenly seemed the most difficult thing in the world. Ernest was not talking very much, and I doubted my ability to hold him very long entranced in conversation. Imagination came to my relief in the thought of a suburban errand. I remembered a wonderful day when I myself had been taken by my uncle to the next town on a journey—the long golden afternoon, the thundering expresses at the station, the amazing watch which he had unaccountably presented me with at the end of the day. Ernest should be taken to Brookfield.
Our lunch had to be taken at the railroad station. Ernest climbed with much puffing up to the high stool by the lunch-counter, and sat there unsteadily and triumphantly while I tried to think what little boys ate for their lunch. My decision for scrambled eggs and a glass of milk was unwise. The excitement of feeding scrambled eggs to a slippery little boy on top of a high stool was full of incredible thrills. The business of preventing a deluge of milk whenever Ernest touched his glass forced me to an intellectual concentration which quite made me forget my own eating. Ernest himself seemed in a state of measureless satisfaction; but the dizzy way in which he brandished his fork, the hairbreadth escape of those morsels of food as they passed over the abyss of his lap, the new and strange impression of smearedness one got from his face, kept me in a state of absorption until I found we had but one minute to catch our train. With Ernest clutching a large buttered roll which he had decently refused to relinquish, we rushed through the gates.
When the candy-man came through the train, Ernest asked me in the most detached tone in the world if I was going to buy any candy. And I asked him with a similar dryness what his preferences in candy were. He expressed a cool interest in lemon-drops. The marvelous way in which Ernest did not eat those lemon-drops gave me a new admiration for his self-control. He finished his buttered roll, gazed out of the window, casually ate two or three lemon-drops, and then carefully closed the box and put it in his pocket. I was almost jealous of Ernest’s character. I recalled my incorrigible nibblings. I predicted for Ernest a moral life.
Our talk was mostly of the things that flashed past our eyes. I was interested in Ernest’s intellectual background. Out of the waste of sign-boards and salt-meadows there was occasionally disentangled a river with boats or a factory or a lumber-yard which Ernest could be called upon to identify. He was in great good humor, squirming on his seat, and he took delight in naming things and in telling me of other trips on the railroad he had taken. He did not ask where we were going. I told him, but it seemed not especially to concern him. He was living in life’s essential,—excitement,—and neither the future nor the past mattered. He held his own ticket a little incredulously, but without that sense of the importance of the business that I had looked for. I found it harder and harder not to treat him as an intellectual equal.
In Brookfield I became conscious of a desire to show Ernest off. I was acquiring a proprietary interest in him. I was getting proud of his good temper, his intelligence, his self-restraint, his capacity for enjoying himself. I wanted to see my pride reflected in another mind. I would take him to my wise old friend, Beulah. I knew how pleasurably mystified she would be at my sudden possession of a chubby, yellow-haired little boy of six.
Ernest had a delightful hour on Beulah’s parlor floor. He turned somersaults, he shouted, he played that I was an evil monster who was trying to catch him. He would crawl up warily towards me and put his hand on my sleepily outstretched palm. As I suddenly woke and seized him, he would dart away in shrieks of fear and glee. When I caught him, I would feel like a grim ogre indeed, for his face would cloud and little tears shoot into his eyes, and his lips would curl in mortal fear. And then I would let him go tugging and sprawling, and he would yell with joy, and steal back with ever-renewed cunning and watchfulness. When he had eaten Beulah’s cakes and drunk her cocoa, he lay back in a big chair, glowing with rosiness, and still laughing at the thought of his escape from my ogredom.
Our minds played about him. I tried to tease Beulah into adopting him. We spoke of his birth in a reformatory, and the apparently indomitable way in which nature had erased this fact from his personality. We wondered about his unknown mother, and his still more unknown father, and what he would be and how either of us could help keeping him forever. She pleaded her Man, I my poverty. But we were not convincing, and I began to conceive a vague fear of Ernest’s adopting me, because I could not let him go.
And then it was time for the train. Ernest was very self-possessed. His manners on leaving Beulah were those of an equal, parting from a very old and jolly friend. The walk to the station gave me a sudden realization how very badly the world was adapted to the needs of little boys. Its measurements, its times, its lengths and its breadths were grotesquely exaggerated. Ernest ploughed manfully along, but I could feel the tug at my hand. Time would have to double itself for him to reach the station in the allotted minutes. His legs were going in great strides like those of the giant in seven-league boots, and he was panting a little. I was cruel, and yet there was the train. I felt myself a symbol of parenthood, earth-adjusted, fixed on an adult goal, dragging little children panting through a world not their own. “I’m ti-yerd!” said Ernest in so plaintive a voice that my heart smote me. Nameless premonitions of what might ensue to Ernest from being ti-yerd came upon me. I felt a vague dread of having already made Ernest an invalid for life. But my adulthood must have triumphed, for the train was caught. Ernest’s spirits revived on the reappearance of the lemon-drops. And my heart leaped to hear him say that only his legs were ti-yerd, and that now they were no longer so. The world had diminished again to his size.