Love's Pilgrimage: A Novel

by Upton Sinclair

And these operations, of course, took the greater part of Corydon’s day; she would struggle at them until she was ready to drop, and when she had to give up they would fall to Thyrsis. Some of them fell to him quite frequently—for instance, the pounding of the meat. It had to have all the fat and gristle carefully cut out; and there had to be a clean board, and a clean hammer, both of which must be scraped and washed afterwards; and whenever by any chance Corydon let the meat stay on the fire a second too long, so that it got hard, the whole elaborate operation had to be gone over again—was not the baby’s life at stake?

It was quite vain for him to protest as to the pains that Corydon took to remove every tiniest fragment of the skin of a stewed prune. “Surely, dearest,” he would argue, “the internal arrangements of a baby are not so delicate as to be torn by a tiny bit of prune-skin!”

But to Corydon the internal arrangements of babies were mysterious things—to be understood only by a child-specialist at five dollars per visit. “He told me what to do,” she would say; “and I am going to do it.”

So she would prepare the concoctions, and would sit and feed them to the baby, spoonful by spoonful; and long after the little one had been stuffed to the bursting-point, she would hold the spoon poised in front of its mouth, making tentative passes, and seeking by some device to cajole the mouth into opening and admitting one last morsel of the precious nutriment. The child had a word of its own inventing, wherewith it denoted things that were good to eat. “Hee, gubum, gubum!” he would exclaim; and Corydon would hold the spoon and repeat “Gubum, gubum,”—long after the baby had begun to sputter and gasp and make plain that it was no longer “gubum”.

Also, under the instructions of the specialist, they made an attempt to break the child of the “hoodaloo mungie” habit. A baby should lie down and go to sleep without handling, the authority had declared; and now that there was all outdoors for him to cry in, they resolved that he should be taught. So they built up the fence about the crib, and laid the baby in for his afternoon nap, and started to go away. And the baby gave one look of perplexity and dismay, and then began to cry. By the time they had got out of the tent he was screaming like a creature possessed; and Corydon and Thyrsis sat outside and stared at each other in wonder and alarm. When she could stand it no more, they went away to a distance; but still the uproar went on. Now and then they would creep back and peep in at the purple and choking infant; and then steal away again, and discuss the phenomenon, and wish that the “child-specialist” were there to advise them. Finally, when the crying had gone on for two hours without a moment’s pause, they gave up, because they were afraid the baby might cry itself into convulsions. And so the “hoodaloo mungie” habit went on for some time yet.

Under the “stuffing regime” the infant at first thrived amazingly; he became fat and rosy, and Corydon’s heart beat high with joy and pride. But then came midsummer, and the hot season; and first of all a rash broke out upon the precious body, and in spite of powders and ointments, refused to go away. Later on came the “hives”, with which the baby was spotted like the top of a pepper-crust. And then, as fate willed it, the family of a woman who did some laundry for Corydon developed the measles; and Corydon found it out too late—and so they were in for the first of a long program of “children’s diseases”.

It was a siege that lasted for a month and more—a nightmare experience. The child had to be kept in a dark place, under pain of losing its eyesight; and when it was very hot in the tent, some one had to sit and fan it. It could not sleep, but writhed and moaned, now screaming in torment, now whimpering like a frightened cur—a sound that wrung Thyrsis’ very heart. And oh, the sight of the little body—purple, a mass of eruptions, and with beads of perspiration upon it! Corydon’s mother came to help her through this ordeal, and would sit for hours upon hours, rocking the wailing infant in her arms.

Section 3. But there were ups as well as downs in this tenting adventure. There came glorious days, when they took long tramps over the hills; or when Thyrsis would carry the child upon his shoulder, and they would wander about the meadows, picking daisies and clover, and making garlands for Corydon. Once Cedric sat down upon a bumble-bee, and that was hard upon him, and perhaps upon the bee. But for the most part the little one was enraptured during these excursions. He was fascinated with the flowers, and continually seeking for an opportunity to devour some of them; while he was doing it he would wear such a roguish smile—it was impossible not to believe that he understood the agitation which these abnormal appetites occasioned in his parents. Corydon would be seized with a sudden access of affection, and she would clutch him in her arms and squeeze him, and fairly smother him with kisses. Of course the youngster would protest wildly at this, and so not infrequently the demonstration would end tragically.

“I can’t have any joy in my baby at all!” she would lament; and Thyrsis would have to soothe the child, and plead with her to find more practical ways of demonstrating her maternal devotion.

Cedric was beginning to make determined efforts to talk now, and he had the most original names for things. His parents would adopt these into their own speech, which thus departed rapidly from established usage. They had to bring themselves to realize that if they went on in that fashion, the child would never learn to speak so that any one else could understand him. The grandmothers were most strenuous upon this point, and would laboriously explain to the infant that chickens and pigeons and sparrows were not all known as “ducky-ducks”; they would plead with it to say “bottle of milk”, while its reckless parents were delighting themselves with such perversions as “bobbu mookie-mook.”