“This child has a strawngly developed animal nature,” pronounced she—“a throwback to the primeval savage, I should opine.”
“Delightful! Do buy him a little stone ax and a baby bearskin, Leila,” I pleaded. “Think what light he will throw upon the Tertiary Period—if Miss Cooter happens to be right!”
But Miss Cooter shook her head. “He must be environed by softening and civilizing influences,” said she, “from this vurry moment. Vegetarian diet is what I should strawngly recommend.” Her eye doubtfully questioned the rapidly sinking level of the sterilized milk in Harold’s glass trumpet.
“There is such a thing as a cow-tree, isn’t there?” said Leila anxiously. “Perhaps Cope might acclimatize one in the tropical house?”
“But while the cow-tree is being acclimatized,” I asked disturbingly, “upon what is Harold to live?”
“Kindly take this,” said Miss Cooter. “May I trouble you? Please!” she repeated sternly. But Harold only screwed up his eyes and dug his pinky fists into them as his monitress took the empty trumpet away, telling us stories of an atypical and highly-cultured boy baby of her acquaintance who not only exhibited Chesterfieldian politeness at four months of age, saying “Please” and “Thank you,” and “Kindly pass the salt,” but regularly performed its own ablutions, went through breathing exercises and simple gymnastics, was familiar with the use of the abacus, and could work out sums in simple addition upon a patent hygienic slate. All these facts Miss Cooter put before us with convincing eloquence. Her language was well chosen, her scientific knowledge and technical skill quite appalling. There was nothing about a baby that she did not understand, except, perhaps—the baby.
From that day Harold lived under the microscope. Charts of his temper, as of his temperature, were regularly kept up to date; and his progress, physical and psychological, was recorded by Miss Cooter in a kind of ship’s log-book, in which data of meteorological disturbances appeared with distressing frequency. He was not precocious enough to be classified as abnormal, or sufficiently original to come under the heading “Atypical,” or old enough to tell lies, and so be dubbed imaginative. But that tertiary ancestor from whom, according to Miss Cooter, he derived his temperament, must have possessed some strength of character, for from the beginning to the end, Harold’s strongest prejudice was manifested towards Miss Cooter, his most violent attachment in the direction of the banished Mary, for whom he howled at regular intervals until he forgot her, when he became reserved, distrustful, and apathetic. His intellectual qualities were not of the kind that responded to scientific forcing. He never learned that an orange was a sphere, or a rusk an irregular cube. The india-rubber letters and object-blocks possessed for him no meaning; the colored balls of the abacus only awakened in him a tepid interest. He was in texture flabby, and habitually wore an expression of languid indifference—intensified when Miss Cooter was delivering one of her oral lectures, to utter boredom. Despite his sanitary surroundings, his day-nursery, intermediate nursery, and night-nursery, papered, carpeted, furnished, lighted, ventilated, and warmed upon the most approved scientific methods, he did not thrive, contracting complaints incidental to infancy with passionate enthusiasm, and keeping them long after another child would have done with them. And then he complicated an unusually violent attack of croup with convulsions, and Miss Cooter guessed she had better resign the case, which she did “right away,” in favor of some atypical, imaginative, non-atavistic young American citizen. When last I looked into the hygienic day-nursery, most of the educational objects it had contained had vanished—presumably into cupboards—and Harold was lying in the cotton lap of his recovered Mary, nursing a stuffed kitten, and sucking an attenuated thumb. The expression of gloomy boredom had vanished from his countenance as Mary chanted a rhyme, deplorably lacking in sense and construction, about a certain Baby Bunting whose father went a-hunting to get a little rabbit-skin to wrap the Baby Bunting in. It afforded Harold such undisguised delight that I felt sure the rabbit must have burrowed in tertiary strata, and that the predatory parents of Baby Bunting must have been the primal type from which Harold hailed. But Miss Cooter, who could alone have sympathized with my scientific delight in this discovery, was tossing in mid-Atlantic on her way to the land of the Stars and Stripes.
We were, however, to meet yet once again under the spangled folds of Old Glory. It was a year or so later, on board a Hudson River steamboat. She was prettier than ever, quite beautifully dressed, and her entourage comprised two nurses (a colored “mammy” and a pretty Swiss), a perambulator with a baby, and a husband. She introduced me to the husband and the baby, a round, rosy baby, neither atypical nor atavistic, but just of the common, old-fashioned kind.
“Isn’t he cute!” she exclaimed, with rapture. “Smile at Momma, Baby, and show um’s pretty toofs!” Then she addressed the child as a “doodleum ducksey,” while I stood speechless and staring.
My circular gaze awakened memories of the past. She asked after Harold.