III
Ernest ate his supper in great contentment at a little table by my fireplace. The unaccustomed task of cooking it gave me new and vivid thrills. And the intellectual concentration involved in heating soup and making toast was so great as to lose me the pleasure of watching Ernest draw. I had asked him in the morning if he liked to draw. He had answered in such scorn that I had hastily called in Michelangelo. Now I placed a pencil and many large sheets of paper negligently near him. When I brought him his supper, he had covered them all with futuristic men, houses, and horses. The floor was strewn with his work, and he was magnificently casting it from him as he attacked these æsthetic problems with fierce gusto. Only the sight of food quelled his artistic rage. After supper, however, he did not return to them. Instead, he became fascinated with the pillows of my couch, and piled them in a line, with a whistling and shouting as of railroad trains. I wrote a little, merely to show myself that this business of parenthood need not devastate one’s life. But I found myself wondering acutely, in the midst of an eloquent sentence, what time it was healthy for Ernest to go to bed. I seemed to remember seven—incredible to me, and yet perhaps meet for a child. It was already seven, but the vigor with which he rejected my proposal startled me. His amiability all day had been so irreproachable that I did not wish to strain it now. Yet I was conscious of an approaching parental crisis. Suppose he did not want to go to bed at all!
When I next looked up, I found that he had compromised by falling asleep in a curious diagonal and perilous position across his pillows—the trainman asleep at the switch. In a position in which nobody could sleep, Ernest slept with the face of an angel. Complexity! Only a brute would wake him. Yet how did parents get their children to bed? And then I thought of the intricacies of his clothes. I touched him very gently; he jumped at me in a dazed way, with the quaintest, “Oh, I don’t know what made me go to sleep!” and was off into the big chair and helpless slumber.
I repented of my brutality. I tried to read, but my parental conscience again smote me. Ernest looked forlorn and maladjusted, his head sinking down on his breast. I thought that Ernest would thank me now for reminding him of his bed. He showed astonishing force of will. I recoiled from the “I don’t want to go to bed!” which he hurled at me. I tried reason. I called his attention to his uncomfortableness. But he was unmoved, and insisted on going to sleep again after every question. I hardened my heart a little. I saw that stern measures would have to be adopted, Ernest’s little clothes taken off, Ernest inserted into his flannel nightgown, and tucked into bed. Yet I had no idea of the parental technique for such situations. Ernest had been quite irresponsive to my appeal that all good little boys went to bed at seven o’clock, and I could think of no further generalizations. Crisis after so happy a day! Was this parenthood?
The variety of buttons and hooks on Ernest’s outer and inner garments bewildered me. Ernest’s dead sleepiness made the work difficult. But finally his little body emerged from the midst, leaving me with the feeling of one who has taken a watch apart and wonders dismayedly how he will ever get it together again. Ernest, however, was not inclined to permit the indignity of this disrobing without bitter protest. When I urged his coöperation in putting on his nightgown, he became voluble. The sunniness of his temper was clouded. His tone turned to harsh bitterness. Little angry tears rolled down his cheeks, and he betrayed his sense of extreme outrage with an “I don’t want to put on my nightgown!” hurled at me with so much of moral pain that I was chilled. But it was too late. I could not unscramble Ernest. With a sinking heart I had gently to thrust his little arms and legs into the warm flannel, trundle him over the floor, bitter and sleepily protesting, roll him into his bed, and cover him up. As he curled and snuggled into the covers his tears dried as if by magic, the bitterness smoothed out of his face, and all his griefs were forgotten.