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 a............