The Incubator Baby

by Ellis Parker Butler

But one day a wonderful thing happened to Marjorie. The nurse and the manager came to Marjorie's incubator, and consulted the chart, and weighed Marjorie and pinched her arms and legs to see whether they were firm and solid, and after that the air in the incubator lost a little of its warmth every day, until it was as cool as the air of the great outside world.

Marjorie was playing the foot game when the end came. She had not the least idea that anything of the sort was going to happen. No one thought of consulting her convenience in the matter.

First her father and mother appeared, and she might have known that something unusual was on foot if she had thought about it, for they had never before visited Marjorie simultaneously, but Marjorie was too deeply in the foot game to pay attention to parents. Parents were a necessity, but the foot game was a joy.

The nurse, who often did unaccountable things to Marjorie, did the most unaccountable of all. She took Marjorie from her bed on the soft, pillow and dressed her in stiff new garments, and enfolded her in blankets and capes until she was like a bundle of soft cloths, with only a little peephole for her eyes, and then, with cruelty unthought of, she handed her bodily to Mrs. Fielding. Marjorie objected. She foresaw some trick in all this. She raised her voice and protested, but they covered her face with a soft white veil. Marjorie indignantly went to....

When she awoke the world had changed. She was in a strange foreign land, where the walls were of white and blue tiles, and the ceiling was white, and the floor was covered with soft rugs. It may have been beautiful but it was not home. There was no incubator.

There were charts and sterilizers and scales and thermometers and everything necessary for a highly systematized and scientific nursery, but there was no incubator, and there was no long line of impertinent, curious faces, constantly passing and constantly changing. Marjorie was homesick.

Mrs. Fielding made the first entry on a brand-new chart, with triumphant satisfaction. She epitomized Marjorie in an array of dates and figures. To Mrs. Fielding and Chiswick, the new nurse, all was well so long as the chart was normal. When the figures on the chart were abnormal they considered that the baby in the crib had transgressed the laws of system and science, and they paid her little attentions in the way of small powders administered in a teaspoon.

Marjorie missed the nickel-plated trimmings of her incubator and she longed to see the procession of faces that she had seen so often. She would have given two degrees of temperature and three respirations just to have a fat, greasy East Side washlady beam upon her as in the incubator days. Even the occasional visits of her father became a joy. She hoped he would be sufficiently weak-minded to take her in his arms, but he was afraid to do anything that might affect the beautifully correct procession of figures on the chart. She tried to soften Chiswick with smiles, and betray her father with gurgles, and she even attempted to astonish her mother by assuming a high temperature and a low pulse, but all she got was a disreputable chart record and a dose of white powder.

She lay back and puckered up her chin and yelled a good, healthy baby yell. Chiswick entered it on the chart. She added a disparaging remark to the effect that the cry was for “no apparent reason.” It was an insult, and Marjorie considered it one.

Where were the pink and white playfellows? A ripple shook the white of her lace-decked skirt; two lumps arose in it; they pushed upward higher and higher until the skirt slid back, and peeping over its edge came ten rosy toes that twinkled at her mischievously. Marjorie held out her hand appealingly, and the two plump feet, that had not dared to venture into the atmosphere of the scientific nursery, cast aside their hesitation, and met the waiting hands half way.