Mrs. White’s was a parental mistake. Some children are born without the kindergarten temperament, and when this happens the effort to develop it is usually futile. Not that my mother consciously attempted to do so. A short time ago I asked her why she had been guilty of sending me to Mrs. White’s, of blighting even in the bud an originally fine mind, and she was obliged to confess she didn’t know. There was in the act no high and definite concept of education. I suspect her of motives as mixed as they were worthy. By sending me to Mrs. White’s she could relieve the household of my beloved but exhausting society for hours and hours and hours at a time, she could “help Mrs. White along” and she could give me the opportunity of learning “how to observe.” Mrs. White’s was the first of Froebel’s infantile observatories to make its appearance in our town and strange things were expected of it.
The prospectus said that “the busy baby fingers” were “trained from the first to coördinate and keep pace with the germinating mentality” which, I was to find out, was merely a polite paraphrase of the good old expression “unmitigated hell.” Every morning a dire conveyance locally known as the “White Maria,” drawn by two rusty, long-haired bay ponies and driven by Mr. White who was likewise long-haired, rusty and bay, careened up to our door at half-past eight and shortly afterwards, depending on the length of time it had taken to extricate me from the banisters of the front stairs among which I had entangled my arms and legs and between which I had thrust my head in order to render my removal as difficult and painful as possible for all concerned, my father would emerge from the house flushed, panting but triumphant with me, screaming, kicking but defeated in his arms. He would then transport me, still howling, to the White Maria, thrust me in, slam the door (it opened at the back) and return to exclaim to my mother, “I really don’t see how we can keep this up much longer.” Once inside the White Maria the busy baby fingers began straightway to coördinate and keep pace with the germinating mentality by transforming the dusky interior into a veritable black hole of Calcutta. I slapped faces, pulled hair, kicked shins, threw lunch-baskets on the floor and stamped upon their contents, while the other children, goaded on to madness and piercing shrieks, ran amuck and did the same. Mr. White never interfered with this perambulating inferno both because he was of an incorrigible cheerfulness—the result of a severe sunstroke—and because he couldn’t see it. As one of Mrs. White’s specialties was the observation of nature in all its various, ever pleasing and instructive moods, the superstructure of the White Maria was a kind of limousine of black oilcloth that at any season of the year effectually shut out air, light, the passing landscape and also Mr. White. The “precious freight” (as Mrs. White called us) within could therefore dismember one another undisturbed. After stopping at several more houses to recruit our spent legions we finally arrived at the school, furious, tearful, disheveled, hating life as we have never hated it since, and proceeded at once to praise God in song and thank Him for our manifold and inscrutable blessings.
“Oh, blesséd work,
Oh, blesséd play,
We thank thee for
Another day,”
was the mendacious refrain of every stanza. When sufficiently irritated by anything I can still sometimes remember the tune. Later in the morning we were supplied with round flat disks like poker chips and again burst reluctantly into melody, exclaiming this time, as we shied the disks into a basket on the floor,
“Did you ever, ever play
Skipping pebbles on the bay,
On the [something-or-other] water?”
Just what kind of water it was, I have never been able to recall. The missing adjective has worried me for years. All over the world I have lain awake at night skipping pebbles on the bay for hours and wondering whether the water was “shining” or “glassy” or “rippling” or “placid” or “deep blue.” Metrical exigencies of course insist that the name shall be writ in water of two syllables and I have often cajoled myself into a troubled sleep by almost deciding that this particular water must have been “pretty.” But even “pretty” lacks the certain completely vapid authenticity that ever eludes me.
The blesséd play was ghastly enough but the blesséd work was torture. I was endowed with neither skill nor patience and at that time I could not lose my shyness before strangers except when I lost my temper. The public exhibition of my inability to “coördinate” was a daily anguish, and I do not yet understand how I ever at last achieved the unspeakably hideous mat of magenta and yellow paper that after the death of my grandmother I found spotlessly preserved among her most cherished possessions. But I not only did—I furthermore succeeded after days and days of agony in constructing a useless, wobbly, altogether horrible little house out of wire and dried peas. It was characteristic of Mrs. White to select from the comprehensive inventory of the world’s possible building materials, wire and dried peas.
If Mrs. White had now and then betrayed the impatience, the annoyance, the despair she had every reason to experience over my stupidity and awkwardness, if at the “psychological moment” she had occasionally spoken sharply, blown me up as did the teachers later at the public school, the effect I am convinced would have been definite and salutary. But hers was the haggard benevolence of the child-gardener in its most indestructible form. All day long sweetness and light glared from her eyes like pharos rays that faileth not because they’ve been wound up. There was in the loving expression around her mouth something appallingly inanimate, objective, detachable; one felt that it hadn’t grown there, it had been put. It bore about the same relation to reality as does the art of the confectioner. It lay against her teeth like the thin white icing on a cake, and the hand that itched to box an ear faltered in its flight pausing to caress a curl. It terrified me to realize that the perishable, narrow strips of glazed, colored paper we tried to weave into mats, and the dried peas with which I finally builded better than I knew were, even as the hairs of our heads, all numbered. This was for the purpose of teaching us neatness and thrift—the husbanding of our resources. To crumple the former or scatter the latter was, we knew, a crime, but Mrs. White’s method of calling our attention to it was merely an insult to the intelligence. The punishment was a deliberate misfit, an elaborately artificial evasion of the point at issue. When, for instance, a dried pea would slip through my clumsy fingers and rattle over the uncarpetted floor with what sounded to me like the detonations of artillery, Mrs. White never told me to wake up and be more careful of what I was doing. Instead she would coo like a philandering pigeon and murmur:
“Why, laddie—what would the hungry little birds say if they were to see all that nice food wasted!” When panic-stricken at the number of my crumpled failures I feloniously thrust them into my pocket, she would fish them out with sweet amaze, exclaiming:
“Why, dearie—how did these get here? Does any little girl or boy know how all these poor little strips of paper got into the very bottom of Charlie’s dark pocket?” When, as once in so often happened, I would “all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself and curse my fate,” she never told me to stop at once and behave myself; she would open her eyes to their incredulous roundest, slightly drop her lower jaw, wonderingly scan every face and then purr: