THE PERMANENT CHILD
I sat watching my baby, my little son, who was asleep—a year old child, fair and strong; and it did not seem a day since he was a tiny red creature, helpless and faintly groping.
As I looked and loved, I thought how it would not seem another day till he was a sturdy boy—a tall youth—a man grown; and I should lose my baby forever!
Then I thought of all the other mothers whose babies were flying from them by day and night—growing up, pushing away; of how we loved our babies and could not keep them even if we would. And I seemed to see the million babies of mankind all over the earth—black and white and yellow and brown, well-loved little ones of a million mothers—breaking into life like bubbles, blossoming, sprouting, coming into being everywhere, every hour, every minute, every second—this budding glory of babyhood—all over the earth: human life springing up in babies, like the Spring grass. And they fled as fast as they came. The days flew by—the weeks, the months, the years—and the babies changes and grew like a transformation scene; taking new shape, new size, new power; disappearing as I watched them, and becoming boys and girls, men and women.
But while I watched this millionfold swift flutter of unceasing change, suddenly something happened to it. The million and million all seemed to coalesce and become one—one little child; and the swift flutter of change grew vague and faint around it, so that although there was a soft uncertainty around the child and a half-visible smoke of growing forms arising from it, yet that small, dimpled shape remained, a little uncertain in outline as in a composite photograph, but steady and changeless as to the eyes—the clear, deep, searching eyes of a child.
My whole heart yearned to him: something rose and swelled within me, deeper, wider, stronger than anything I had ever felt before. I loved him as I had never loved my own, as I had never known I could love—and suddenly I felt that I too had changed, and that I was now not only a mother but THE MOTHER; and I saw what it was I loved: it was THE CHILD. And I longed to feed and guard and shelter and serve that Child as might a million mothers made into one, with all the sweet helplessness, all the glorious promise of a million children made one for her to love.
Then as I watched those deep child eyes: as my heart swelled and ached with that great love: I saw—I felt—I knew—what had been borne, and still was borne, by this; The Child in human history. I saw the savage mother and the savage father caring for the children the best they knew, with all the torture and distortion, all the cruel initiations, all the black, blind superstitions of those old times, to the crowning horror of infant sacrifice when the child went through the fire to Moloch—for his parents' sins!—the living, loving, helpless child, sacrificed by his parents. I saw the bent skull of the Flathead Indian child, the crippled feet of the Chinese girl child, the age-long, hideous life and death of the child-wife and the child-widow of Hindoostan. I saw The Child in Sparta, and The Child in Rome, The Child in the Dark Ages, The Child scourged, imprisoned, starved, its mind filled with all manner of black falsehoods, its body misunderstood, and maltreated; and my heart ached, and I cried out, "Were there no Mothers for those children?"
And then I saw behind The Child, The Mother visible—the vague, composite, mighty form of a million mothers made as one—but her heart was my heart to feel and know.
I said to her—aching for her yet full of awful blame—"Could you not have saved The Child from this?"
And she wrung her hands. "I loved my child," she said.