He is not “merry.” Merry boys have pretty manners, and it must be owned that this boy’s manners are not pretty. But if not merry, he is happy; there never was a more untroubled soul. If he has an almost grotesque reticence, he has no secrets. Nothing that he thinks is very much hidden. Even if he did not push his father, it would be evident that the boy loves him; even if he never laid his hand (and this little thing he does rarely) on his friend’s shoulder, it would be plain that he loves his friend. His happiness appears in his moody and charming face, his ambition in his dumbness, and the hopes of his life to come in ungainly bearing. How does so much heart, how does so much sweetness, all unexpressed, appear? For it is not only those who know him well that know the child’s heart; strangers are aware of it. This, which he would not reveal, is the only thing that is quite unmistakable and quite conspicuous.
What he thinks that he turns visibly to the world is a sense of humour, with a measure of criticism and of indifference. What he thinks the world may divine in him is courage and an intelligence. But carry himself how he will, he is manifestly a tender, gentle, and even spiritual creature, masculine and innocent—“a nice boy.” There is no other way of describing him than that of his own brief language.
ILLNESS
The patience of young children in illness is a commonplace of some little books, but none the less a fresh fact. In spite of the sentimental, children in illness remain the full sources of perpetual surprises. Their self-control in real suffering is a wonder. A little turbulent girl, brilliant and wild, and unaccustomed, it might be thought, to deal in any way with her own impulses—a child whose way was to cry out, laugh, complain, and triumph without bating anything of her own temperament, and without the hesitation of a moment, struck her face, on a run, against a wall and was cut and in a moment overwhelmed with pain and covered with blood. “Tell mother it’s nothing! Tell mother, quick, it’s nothing!” cried the magnanimous child as soon as she could speak.
The same child fell over the rail of a staircase and was obliged to lie for some ten days on her back, so that the strained but not broken little body might recover itself. Every movement was, in a measure, painful; and there was a long captivity, a helplessness enforced and guarded by twinges, a constant impossibility to yield to the one thing that had carried her through all her years—impulse. A condition of acute consciousness was imposed upon a creature whose first condition of life had been unconsciousness; and this during the long period of ten of a child’s days and nights at eight years old.
Yet during every hour of the time the child was not only gay but patient, not fitfully, but steadily, resigned, sparing of requests, reluctant to be served, inventive of tender and pious little words that she had never used before. “You are exquisite to me, mother,” she said, at receiving some common service.
Even in the altering and harassing conditions of fever, a generous child assumes the almost incredible attitude of deliberate patience. Not that illness is to be trusted to work so. There is another child who in his brief indispositions becomes invincible, armed against medicine finally. The last appeal to force, as his distracted elders find, is all but an impossibility; but in any case it would be a failure. You can bring the spoon to the child, but three nurses cannot make him drink. This, then, is the occasion of the ultimate resistance. He raises the standard of revolution, and casts every tradition and every precept to the wind on which it flies. He has his elders at a disadvantage; for if they pursue him with a grotesque spoon their maxims and commands are, at the moment, still more grotesque. He is committed to the wild novelty of absolute refusal. He not only refuses, moreover, he disbelieves; he throws everything over. Told that the medicine is not so bad, this nihilist laughs.
Medicine apart, a minor ailment is an interest and a joy. “Am I unwell to-day, mother?” asks a child with all his faith and confidence at the highest point.
THE YOUNG CHILD
The infant of literature “wails” and wails feebly, with the invariability of a thing unproved and taken for granted. Nothing, nevertheless, could be more unlike a wail than the most distinctive cry whereon the child of man catches his first breath. It is a hasty, huddled outcry, sharp and brief, rather deep than shrill in tone. With all deference to old moralities, man does not weep at beginning this world; he simply lifts up his new voice much as do the birds in the Zoological Gardens, and with much the same tone as some of the duck kind there. He does not weep for some months to come. His outcry soon becomes the human cry that is better known than loved, but tears belong to later infancy. And if the infant of days neither wails nor weeps, the infant of months is still too young to be gay. A child’s mirth, when at last it begins, is his first secret; you understand little of it. The first smile (for the convulsive movement in sleep that is popularly adorned by that name is not a smile) is an uncertain sketch of a smile, unpractised but unmistakable. It is accompanied by a single sound—a sound that would be a monosyllable if it were articulate—which is the utterance, though hardly the communication, of a private jollity. That and that alone is the real beginning of human laughter.