The Man Who Lived in a Shoe

by Henry James Forman

I stole into the bedroom last night where the children were sleeping, while Griselda was making up my couch in the study.

With their flushed faces they lay there almost visibly glowing before my eyes with that perfect faith that children seem to have in the grown-up world about them. Heine somewhere speaks of angels guarding the child's couch, and it is not sheer poetry. Their faith and trust, still illusioned, brevets, I suppose, to angelic rank every one about them. Randolph, with a slight frown and moving lips, dreaming seemingly of something active and strenuous, as befits his ripe age of eleven; Laura, serene with her mother's countenance and straying curls, and little Jimmie with his tumbled hair like that of some child by Praxiteles or Phidias—they slept—secure in their trust, despite their recent shattering bereavement.

No one can really know anything about children until he has seen them sleeping. Like fortune, they are always trustfully in the lap of the gods. Never before had they touched me as they seemed to touch the hidden springs in me at that moment. It was so, I pictured, that Laura was wont to steal into their dormitory of nights before going to bed; and that vision, no doubt, was a potent help to her courage to continue uncomplainingly and brave in the face of sorrow, humiliation and her self-effacing loneliness. Would I had been able to picture such things more clearly while she was living.

Griselda surprised me emerging from the room and she smiled, the austere, inscrutable Griselda, with such a smile as Michelangelo might have depicted on the face of one of his Sistine Sybils, those weird sisters who seem to know all things because they have suffered all.

I muttered a casual good night to Griselda and brushed by her nonchalantly, as a boy whistles with apparent carelessness when he feels most awkward or uneasy.

I slept upon my problem in the way old wives advise you, but to-day I am no nearer the solution.

I keep trying coolly to imagine them in appropriately chosen schools and homes, and yet some tugging at my heart strings, some strange alchemy of the brain, wipes out those images before they are formed and replaces them with the vision I saw last night in my invaded bedroom.

Who is to help me make a choice? And before I have put down these words I realize that no one will help me. My dining room is at this moment vocal with their laughter—but something within me is more loudly clamorous yet against the treachery I am planning them. Treachery! That is nonsense, of course. I have a perfect right to decide what I choose. But already that word keeps recurring in my brain whenever I envisage their dispersal.

My decision is taken.

I can hardly say who made it. In reality, I suppose it has made itself. But however it came about, there—heaven help me!—it is.