he arrived late—long after the ship of his father’s fortune had been safely tugged into dock—announcing his entrance upon this terrestrial stage at a moment when people had ceased to expect him. i may say that tom and leila, having spent twelve years of married life in the propagation of theories alone, had the most definite notions upon the subject of infant rearing, training, culture, and so forth. leila intended, she informed me in confidence, to be “an advanced mother,” and tom, as father to the child of an advanced mother, could hardly help turning out an advanced father, even had he not cherished ambitions in that line.
the boy—for, as tom reassured all sympathetic callers during the high-pressure first week of its existence, it undoubtedly was a boy—seemed on first sight rather smaller and spottier than the child of so many brilliant prospects had any right to be. they gave him the name of harold, a clanking procession of other names coupled on to it, ending in alexander eric. and they engaged and imported a professional child culturist, miss sallie cooter, of washington—pronounced wawshington—certified teacher, trained nurse, member of the ethnophysiological society of america, and one doesn’t know how many others, to rear harold on the very latest scientific plan. miss cooter, as the intimate friend and chosen disciple of the inventress of the system at which tom and leila had taken fire (a lady of literary talents and original views, who had brought up, on purely hygienic principles, a family of one, and expanded 288it into a multiplicity of chapters)—miss cooter might be trusted to achieve the desired result, and turn out harold, physically and mentally, a prodigy of infantile perfection. her work was purely philanthropic, and if she consented to accept the inadequate salary of two hundred a year in return for her services, leila and tom explained, she must in no sense be treated as a hireling.
the united efforts of the brougham and the spring-cart fetched miss cooter and a mountain of saratogas from the station one spring day, and she came down to afternoon tea in the very newest of parisian tea-gowns, which, properly speaking, is not a tea-gown at all. she was decidedly pretty, being dark, slim, bright-eyed, keen-featured, and almost painfully intelligent-looking, even without her gold-framed pince-nez. we devoted the evening to sociality, as harold’s regimen of mental and physical culture was to commence upon the following day.
“but you shall have a little peep at baby,” leila said, “when we go up to dress for dinner.”
miss cooter agreed. “but i guess i’ve got to ask you, since the boy’s name is har’ld, to call him by it, and no other,” she said. “our society is dead against abbreviations and pet names. we hold that they act as a clog upon the expanding faculties of the child, and arrest mental progress. besides, when maturity is reached, how pyfectly absurd it is to hear middle-aged men and women addressed as ‘toto’ and ‘tiny’!”
tom, who has a way of calling leila “mouse” when in good humor, turned rich imperial purple at this home-thrust, and leila, whose pet name for tom is “tumps,” called attention to the green-fly on the pot-roses, both silently registering a vow never again, save in camera, to use the offending appellations.
miss cooter was formally invested with harold on 289the following morning. his ex-nurse, a plump, rosy-cheeked country-woman, painfully devoid of culture, and absolutely unskilled in the repression of emotion, was relegated, in floods of tears, to command of the laundry. leila, compassionating the grief of the exile, would have pleaded for mary’s reduction to the post of under-nurse; but miss cooter pronounced that mary was an obstacle in the way of progress, and an enemy to culture, and must go.
mary went, and harold, at first too stunned by her desertion to yield to sorrow, presently proclaimed his bereavement in a succession of ear-piercing shrieks.
“what is to be done?” queried leila, by signs.
applying both hands to his mouth, after the fashion of a speaking-trumpet, tom vocalized the suggestion, “send—for mary—back!”
but miss cooter sternly shook her head, and, bending over the cradle which contained harold, looked sternly in his flushed and disfigured countenance. he immediately held his breath, growing from crimson to purple and from purple to black as she delivered her inaugural address.
“my dear har’ld,” said she, with crisp distinctness, “you are a vurry little boy——”
“hear, hear!” i interpolated, and got a frown from leila.
“and at three months old your reasoning fahculties are not developed enough for you to comprehend that what you don’t like may be the best thing for you. mary has gone, and mary will not come back. henceforth you are in my cayah, and you will find me fyum, but gentle. however badly you may act, i shall not punish you.”
harold hiccoughed and stared up at the bright, intellectual face above him with round, astonished eyes and open, dribbling mouth.
290“your own sense of what is right and what is wrawng, dormant though it be at this vurry moment, i intend to awaken and——”
harold, never before in his brief life harangued after this fashion, appeared to grasp already the idea that something was wrong. the expression of astonishment faded, his down-drooped mouth assumed the bell or trumpet-shape, and, rapidly doubling and undoubling himself with mechanical regularity, he emitted the most astonishing series of sounds we had yet heard from him. no caresses were administered for the assuagement of his woe, no broken english babbled in his infant ears. the rules of the system of child culture absolutely prohibited petting, and baby-language was denounced by miss cooter as “pynicious.”
as she predicted, harold left off howling after a certain interval.
“now i guess you have lyned one lesson already!” said miss cooter. “when you are older, har’ld, you will cawmprehend that the truest kindness on your payrents’ part praumpted the separation that has given you pain. you will have your bottle now; you will say ‘thank you’ for it, and ahfter consuming the contents, you will go quietly to sleep.”
but it took a long time to convince the dubious harold that the trumpet-shaped, nickel-silver-stoppered vessel tendered by his new guardian was the equivalent of his beloved and familiar “maw.” when finally convinced, he grabbed it without the slightest attempt at saying “thank you,” and, with the gloomiest scowl that i have ever beheld upon a countenance of such pulpy immaturity, applied himself to deglutition. miss cooter shook her head discouragingly.
“this child has a strawngly developed animal nature,” pronounced she—“a throwback to the primeval savage, i should opine.”
291“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 292of 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 293in 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.
“he is very well—now!” i said with point. “may i be pardoned for remarking that you do not appear to be rearing your own baby upon the system of child culture you formerly followed with such extraordinary success?”
“no,” said the late miss cooter thoughtfully. “no-o!”
294“why not?” i asked, hot with the remembrance of harold’s sufferings.
miss cooter considered, a beautifully manicured forefinger in a dimple that i had never observed before.
“why not? you earnestly advocated the system—for other people’s babies.”
“well,” said the late miss cooter, with a burst of candor, “i reckon because those were other people’s babies. this is mine!”
