Deep down in the heart of childhood—even bitterly suffering childhood—is this dramatic element, this love of sensation, this vanity of artist. So much of childhood is, after all, make-believe, unconscious acting. We are ill, and we cannot help noting the effect of our illness upon others. The amount of sympathy we evoke in grown-up people is the best evidence of our success as experimental artists with life. Even when we cower under a bed to weep away from our kind, we secretly hope that God or our guardian angel is watching us and feeling intensely sorry for us; and our finest conception of punishment of cruel elders is their finding us unexpectedly dead, and their being consumed with remorse for their flagrant injustice to such virtue as ours.
Who can limit the part as admiring audience a child condemns his guardian angel to play? For him, when humanity is cold and unobservant—as humanity too often is in the eyes of childhood—does he so gallantly play the martyr, the hero, the sufferer in proud silence. For his admiration did a little sister of mine once put her hand in the fire. She thought it was heroic, like the early Christians, and hoped her guardian angel would applaud, while common elders shouted in angry alarm.
Ah, never prate so idly of the artlessness and the guilelessness of children. They are as full of vanity and innocent guile and all the arts and graces as the puppies and kittens we adore.
How much, for instance, had the hope of praise and admiration to do with Louie's magnanimous kindness in that affair of the gipsies? I lay ill and exhausted from coughing on the sofa when he rushed in, panting with eagerness, to tell me that the gipsies had arrived over-night and were camped on the green, where they had a merry-go-round. I had never seen a gipsy, but Mary Jane had, and she often told me the most surprising things about them—how dark they were, how queerly they spoke, and how romantic they looked, like strange people in story-books. Of course I pined to see them, and the thought that I was chained to my sofa, when outside the world was all agog, and rapture awaited happier children upon the green, filled my eyes with tears.
I turned my face to the wall and wept bitterly. My heart was heavy with the sombre hate of Cain, and when I looked gloweringly at the blest little Abel by my side, he looked quite as miserable as my evil, envious heart could desire. His comic face underwent a variety of contortions before finally he made up his mind to blurt out an offer to forego the pleasures of the green, and stay with me.
But I was not a selfish child, and generosity always spurred me to emulation. Besides, I was already greatly comforted by the extent of Louie's sympathy, so I ordered him off to see the gipsies, and come back and tell me what a merry-go-round was like.
Still I did not mend, in spite of all nurse's care and tenderness, and it was decided to remove me to town. This was the decision of my stepfather, who was probably nervous since Stevie had dropped out of life in that quick and quiet way.
How well I remember the last day among all my dear friends! Mary Jane, Louie, and I, hand in hand, walked about all our favourite spots. The applewoman gave me an entire trayful of crab-apples, and wished I might come back with my rosy cheeks. I asked her to kiss me, and then she thrust a bun into my hand, and said huskily, "God bless you, my little lady!"
We went across to Mary Jane's, and I had a conviction that my heart was broken. I was going away into the land of the ogres and witches, and though I should probably be happy at last, since all things come right in children's tales, vague terror held me at the prospect of the unknown trials that awaited me. Mary Jane's mamma gave me raspberry vinegar and my tears mingled with the syrup. I asked to be let look once more at the views of New York, and then asked her if she would feel very sorry at my death.
They were still consoling me, and I was sobbing wildly in the arms of Mary Jane's mamma, while Louie relieved his stricken soul by protesting repeatedly that "it was an awful shame," when nurse and Jim Cochrane, in his Sunday clothes, came to carry me off to the car. All the village flocked to see me off, and breathed cordial love and benediction upon my departure.