History of a literary radical, and other essays

by Randolph Silliman Bourne

When the candy-man came through the train, Ernest asked me in the most detached tone in the world if I was going to buy any candy. And I asked him with a similar dryness what his preferences in candy were. He expressed a cool interest in lemon-drops. The marvelous way in which Ernest did not eat those lemon-drops gave me a new admiration for his self-control. He finished his buttered roll, gazed out of the window, casually ate two or three lemon-drops, and then carefully closed the box and put it in his pocket. I was almost jealous of Ernest’s character. I recalled my incorrigible nibblings. I predicted for Ernest a moral life.

Our talk was mostly of the things that flashed past our eyes. I was interested in Ernest’s intellectual background. Out of the waste of sign-boards and salt-meadows there was occasionally disentangled a river with boats or a factory or a lumber-yard which Ernest could be called upon to identify. He was in great good humor, squirming on his seat, and he took delight in naming things and in telling me of other trips on the railroad he had taken. He did not ask where we were going. I told him, but it seemed not especially to concern him. He was living in life’s essential,—excitement,—and neither the future nor the past mattered. He held his own ticket a little incredulously, but without that sense of the importance of the business that I had looked for. I found it harder and harder not to treat him as an intellectual equal.

In Brookfield I became conscious of a desire to show Ernest off. I was acquiring a proprietary interest in him. I was getting proud of his good temper, his intelligence, his self-restraint, his capacity for enjoying himself. I wanted to see my pride reflected in another mind. I would take him to my wise old friend, Beulah. I knew how pleasurably mystified she would be at my sudden possession of a chubby, yellow-haired little boy of six.

Ernest had a delightful hour on Beulah’s parlor floor. He turned somersaults, he shouted, he played that I was an evil monster who was trying to catch him. He would crawl up warily towards me and put his hand on my sleepily outstretched palm. As I suddenly woke and seized him, he would dart away in shrieks of fear and glee. When I caught him, I would feel like a grim ogre indeed, for his face would cloud and little tears shoot into his eyes, and his lips would curl in mortal fear. And then I would let him go tugging and sprawling, and he would yell with joy, and steal back with ever-renewed cunning and watchfulness. When he had eaten Beulah’s cakes and drunk her cocoa, he lay back in a big chair, glowing with rosiness, and still laughing at the thought of his escape from my ogredom.

Our minds played about him. I tried to tease Beulah into adopting him. We spoke of his birth in a reformatory, and the apparently indomitable way in which nature had erased this fact from his personality. We wondered about his unknown mother, and his still more unknown father, and what he would be and how either of us could help keeping him forever. She pleaded her Man, I my poverty. But we were not convincing, and I began to conceive a vague fear of Ernest’s adopting me, because I could not let him go.

And then it was time for the train. Ernest was very self-possessed. His manners on leaving Beulah were those of an equal, parting from a very old and jolly friend. The walk to the station gave me a sudden realization how very badly the world was adapted to the needs of little boys. Its measurements, its times, its lengths and its breadths were grotesquely exaggerated. Ernest ploughed manfully along, but I could feel the tug at my hand. Time would have to double itself for him to reach the station in the allotted minutes. His legs were going in great strides like those of the giant in seven-league boots, and he was panting a little. I was cruel, and yet there was the train. I felt myself a symbol of parenthood, earth-adjusted, fixed on an adult goal, dragging little children panting through a world not their own. “I’m ti-yerd!” said Ernest in so plaintive a voice that my heart smote me. Nameless premonitions of what might ensue to Ernest from being ti-yerd came upon me. I felt a vague dread of having already made Ernest an invalid for life. But my adulthood must have triumphed, for the train was caught. Ernest’s spirits revived on the reappearance of the lemon-drops. And my heart leaped to hear him say that only his legs were ti-yerd, and that now they were no longer so. The world had diminished again to his size.

III

Ernest ate his supper in great contentment at a little table by my fireplace. The unaccustomed task of cooking it gave me new and vivid thrills. And the intellectual concentration involved in heating soup and making toast was so great as to lose me the pleasure of watching Ernest draw. I had asked him in the morning if he liked to draw. He had answered in such scorn that I had hastily called in Michelangelo. Now I placed a pencil and many large sheets of paper negligently near him. When I brought him his supper, he had covered them all with futuristic men, houses, and horses. The floor was strewn with his work, and he was magnificently casting it from him as he attacked these æsthetic problems with fierce gusto. Only the sight of food quelled his artistic rage. After supper, however, he did not return to them. Instead, he became fascinated with the pillows of my couch, and piled them in a line, with a whistling and shouting as of railroad trains. I wrote a little, merely to show myself that this business of parenthood need not devastate one’s life. But I found myself wondering acutely, in the midst of an eloquent sentence, what time it was healthy for Ernest to go to bed. I seemed to remember seven—incredible to me, and yet perhaps meet for a child. It was already seven, but the vigor with which he rejected my proposal startled me. His amiability all day had been so irreproachable that I did not wish to strain it now. Yet I was conscious of an approaching parental crisis. Suppose he did not want to go to bed at all!

When I next looked up, I found that he had compromised by falling asleep in a curious diagonal and perilous position across his pillows—the trainman asleep at the switch. In a position in which nobody could sleep, Ernest slept with the face of an angel. Complexity! Only a brute would wake him. Yet how did parents get their children to bed? And then I thought of the intricacies of his clothes. I touched him very gently; he jumped at me in a dazed way, with the quaintest, “Oh, I don’t know what made me go to sleep!” and was off into the big chair and helpless slumber.

I repented of my brutality. I tried to read, but my parental conscience again smote me. Ernest looked forlorn and maladjusted, his head sinking down on his breast. I thought that Ernest would thank me now for reminding him of his bed. He showed astonishing force of will. I recoiled from the “I don’t want to go to bed!” which he hurled at me. I tried reason. I called his attention to his uncomfortableness. But he was unmoved, and insisted on going to sleep again after every question. I hardened my heart a little. I saw that stern measures would have to be adopted, Ernest’s little clothes taken off, Ernest inserted into his flannel nightgown, and tucked into bed. Yet I had no idea of the parental technique for such situations. Ernest had been quite irresponsive to my appeal that all good little boys went to bed at seven o’clock, and I could think of no further generalizations. Crisis after so happy a day! Was this parenthood?