And in one respect Miss Deane has scored more heavily than she could well have realized. Her warning that I should protect H. 3rd from radical literature touches an impending tragedy in my life. Almost by intuition Miss Deane seems to realize that the child and I are not in agreement in our political opinions. Of the fifteen or twenty words in which H. 3rd is proficient one is "mine" and another is "gimme." When he goes to the park he wears a naval uniform with the insignia of an ensign on his left arm. There is gold braid on his cap. Moreover, H. 3rd has in his own right two Liberty bonds, a card of thrift stamps, a rocking-horse, a railroad, a submarine, three picture books, an automobile and a Noah's ark. Any effort to socialize a single one of these holdings is met by a protest so violent that I cannot help but realize that the child's sense of property rights is strongly developed. That is, his own property rights, for he is often inclined to dispute my title to cigarette stumps, safety razor blades and carving knives.
Moreover, H. 3rd is unblushingly parasitic. We fail to remember that he has ever offered to make any return for the regular income of milk and oatmeal, and sometimes carrots, which is issued to him regularly by his parents. To be sure, he once gave me a chicken bone and on another occasion a spool of cotton, but both times he promptly took them away again. I am even inclined to question whether, in any strictly legal sense, the chicken bone or the spool were his. Granting that they had been carelessly discarded by other members of his family, and that, by his own efforts, H. 3rd rescued the spool from the scrapbasket and the chicken bone from behind the trash box, the fact remains that it was I who bought the chicken and Miss X who purchased the spool. We were entitled at least to a royalty during the life of the two utilities, but H. 3rd merely absorbed them without explanation or promise.
I doubt whether Dell or Eastman or even Karl Marx himself could avail to check the rampant individualism of the child. He has always displayed an impatience and an irritation at abstract arguments. The best that can be done is to avoid introducing contentious subjects. For the present Miss X and I are able to carry on destructive and seditious conversations even in his presence by spelling out "p-r-o-l-e-t-a-r-i-a-t" and "b-o-u-r-g-e-o-i-s-i-e" and other words which might make him mad. We have even been able to keep Trotzky's picture above the mantelpiece in the red room, but in this case Miss X adopted a subterfuge which seems to me rather questionable. She told H. 3rd that it was a portrait of Nicholas Murray Butler.
When H. 3rd is twenty-one he will come into undisputed possession of the two Liberty bonds and the card of thrift stamps for which Miss X and I starved and scraped. I rather hope he will thank us, but beyond that I expect nothing except good advice. I can see him now squaring his shoulders, as becomes a man of property and independent income, and then laying a kindly hand on my shoulder as he says, "Dad, can't you understand how wrong you are? Don't you see that if you disturb or even threaten the institution of private property you undermine the home, imperil the state and destroy initiative?"
JANUARY 21, 1920.—When the rest went out and left me alone in the house, they said that H. 3rd would surely sleep through the evening. Nobody remembered that he had ever waked up to cry. But he did this night. I didn't quite know what to do about it. I sang "Rockabye Baby" to him, but that didn't do any good, and then I said "I wouldn't cry if I were you." This, too, had no effect, and, in fact, no sooner had I uttered it than I recognized it as a piece of gratuitous impertinence. How could I possibly tell whether or not I would cry if the safety pins were in wrong or anything else of that sort was not quite right?
Nor was it even fair to assume that H. 3rd was crying for any such personal reasons. After all, he lives in a state which has recently suspended five duly elected assemblymen, and in which as fine a book as Jurgen has aroused the meddlesome attention of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and his country has gone quite hysterical on the subject of "Reds" and "Red" propaganda and I haven't paid him back yet for that $50 Liberty Bond of his which I sold.
And after I had thought of these things it seemed to me that he was entirely justified in crying, and that I ought to be ashamed of myself because I didn't cry, too, since there were so many wrong things in the world to be righted. Humbly I left him to continue his dignified protest without any further unwarranted meddling on my part.
JANUARY 24, 1920.—"My attention has been called," writes John S. Sumner, secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, "to a paragraph of your article in the Tribune of January 21, wherein you refrain from blaming H. 3rd for crying, because among other things, he 'lives in a state which has recently suspended five duly elected assemblymen, and in which as fine a book as Jurgen has aroused the meddlesome attention of the Society for the Suppression of Vice.'