III
That was the first time Nathan and I seriously discussed The Sex,—when the boy’s grief was spent and in its wake came philosophy.
“Gee, but she was pretty, Billy,” he confided. “She was different, too, than girls here ’round Foxboro. I sort of felt funny in my insides when I seen her. Mabel Turner now—she’s fat and red-faced and her clothes is always coming apart somewheres. Mary Anderson, she’s always laughin’ and makin’ fun of my freckles, and Alice Blake’s got freckles worse’n me, and warts besides. But this girl—gee, Billy, she was swell. I wonder why was it I felt so funny about her right off as soon as I seen her. I never felt that way about no girl before. Most girls is—well, just girls!—you know!—no good!”
“That’s love!” I declared largely.
“Love?” Nathan was awed. “Then love’s swell, ain’t it?”
“Depends how you look at it. Sometimes it is. Then again it ain’t.”
Nat pondered this. It was deep. Finally in a whisper he asked:
“Billy, why is it that girls is different from boys, and women from men?”
“It’s on account of babies,” I expatiated. “Benny Mayo said so. A man told him once.”
“How, on account o’ babies, Billy?”
Thereupon I recounted boyhood’s version of the intricacies of obstetrics, as viewed by boys who are not wholly fools.
I hold no brief for myself. The parent who will not concede that mere children do not seek light on life’s greatest mystery—where do people come from?—and ultimately discuss it, is an ass. Only there was no perverted mischief on my part about it. Nathan wanted to know something. I possessed the information. It was no more than as if he had asked me how to make a willow whistle or bait a chuck-trap.
“Gee!” exclaimed Nathan frightenedly, “suppose it’s so, Billy?”
“There’s sumpin to it,” I averred. “We’re all here, ain’t we? I’m gonna ask my Ma.”
“So’m I,” declared my chum.
Nathan finally started homeward. That night he sought elucidation for the mystery exactly where it was normal he should seek it,—from his mother. But instead of supplying his need in a healthy, kindly fashion fitted to his years, Anna Forge did a narrow, vicious thing.
She whirled on her small son with an alacrity which startled the senses out of him. And she administered a shock to the sensitive boy whose effects did not entirely vanish with manhood.
“Who put such ideas into your head?” she demanded hysterically.
“Nobody ‘specially, Ma. I was just thinkin’, that’s all.”
“No! Some one put the idea into your head. Who was it?”
Nathan began to cry.
“B-B-Billy and me was talkin’ about it in the haymow this afternoon.”
“So Billy did it! I shall see Billy’s mother in the morning and have him horsewhipped for what he told you.”
Nathan began to cry harder.
“Why, Ma?” he demanded in panic.
“Because all such things are vile and dirty and filthy and horrible! Little boys who think them don’t go to heaven and have angels love them. They go to the Bad Place and are burned in fire forever and ever. You know how it hurt when you burnt your finger on my flatiron yesterday? Imagine you were burnt all over your body like that—and there was no way to stop it and you just had to suffer terribly with never a moment to sleep or forget. That’s what happens to bad little boys who say such things or even think them!”
“But why is it bad, Ma? Billy didn’t mean to be bad. We just wondered, that’s all. I can’t help thinking about ’em, can I?”
“Oh, what a wicked, wicked little boy! Your dear mother will be up in heaven and she won’t have any little son with her. Her little son will be down in the fires of hell—burning for always and always!”
The Forge woman pictured eternal torment so vividly that Nathan grew hysterical. When the woman had the boy worked into such a state that he was too terrified to stay alone in the dark because of the devils waiting to grab him, she made him promise never to think about girls or women or babies again. Sniveling, the little shaver promised.
His mother went to her bedroom and narrated the affair to her husband. Johnathan was for thrashing the boy soundly at once.
“No—you’ve given him one whipping to-day and one whipping a day is enough. I think I’ve scared him so badly that he won’t think of the subject again. And to-morrow I shall certainly see Billy’s mother. If she doesn’t chastise her dirty-minded young one, I shan’t let Nathan go on playing with him.”
Grumbling, John Forge was persuaded. Next day Mrs. Forge went into indignant session with my mother.
“Yes, Billy catechised me in the same way,” the latter responded. “I told him what I thought it sane and reasonable to tell a lad of his years. He’ll learn it outside, anyway. Probably he’ll get a sordid, vulgar, perverted version. I don’t believe you can scare these things from the minds of live-wire children, nor stifle the most normal impulses of growing boyhood. I for one shan’t try. As my boy grows I want him to feel that he can come to his mother at any time with his problems, especially his girl problems, without having the immortal daylights scared out of him or made to feel that he’s a criminal. It ain’t natural, Anna Forge, and so it ain’t common sense.”
“My boy shall not go on playing with yours, if that’s the sort of thing they’re talking.”
“Suit yourself, Anna Forge. I believe your philosophy’s wrong and you’ll live to rue it.”
“I don’t have to be told what’s decent for my own young one!”
“Maybe you do and maybe you don’t. That’s yet to be proven.”
Anna Forge stalked homeward. The two women did not speak for a month. But Nat’s mother had done a malicious thing that day. She had only turned the barb of my friend’s curiosity inward and prodded that worst enemy of the human race to attack her small son viciously: Repression.