THE FIRST WORD
UPON my honour, some married people don’t deserve to have a baby at all. Take my parents. Here am I just about to celebrate the first anniversary of my birthday, and, candidly, at times I feel disposed to give up fighting even here, on the very threshold of a career which many experts have agreed to consider most promising. If it were not for my bottle-holder, I should have thrown up the sponge long ago. My papa and mamma, to be frank, get on my nerves and age me; my nurse alone has power to calm the storm. The truth is, that with a first child the average inexperienced young father and mother expect a jolly deal too much. The parents of a long family take new babies as they come, and don’t worry about them and boast about them, and look for signs and wonders before a chap is weaned. But your beginners! What my people expect I don’t know. I try to oblige,but there is always something wrong. If they would only leave me to my nurse—who is a particularly pleasing, competent person, and knows her business—it might be better for everybody concerned. And that is true, because I have heard her say so a dozen times in private. Moreover, they—I mean my father and mother—might give Nature a chance. To hear them you would think that Nature had overlooked me altogether. For instance, it cannot be denied that she was a trifle behindhand with my first teeth—the four little front ones. Well, what then? It merely amounted to a question of a few days.Ididn’t want the teeth. My whole life stretched out before me, and a fortnight more or less without them made no practical difference. I knew—nobody better—that they were on the way all right. But my parents had read somewhere at what time the teeth were due; or else my doctor, like a fool, had been worried into giving a definite date; and when the day arrived and the teeth didn’t, my mother cried and my father poked about in my mouth with his forefinger until I felt I would have given something for a tooth or two, just to remonstrate with. I couldn’t say what I thought about it, but my nurse could, thank God, and did. Andthen my mother said she had produced a horrid, toothless freak of Nature, and my father went away to town with a face from which all joy in life had departed. It was the same look which he wore for a week during my vaccinating troubles. It is not too much to say that he added a pang to the horrors of that circumstance. I “took” badly, and came out speckled one morning in consequence. My medical man was sent for, and said it was a “noble arm,” and seemed pleased at what he had arranged. Well, that was good enough for me. The man had brought me into the world, and I trusted him. But my father declared that he had never seen vaccination speckle a child on the stomach in his life (which was doubtless true) and he murmured something about a second opinion. The doctor was good-natured about it, fortunately; many practitioners would have thrown up the case; but when the speckles went off my father wrote and apologised.
Babies hate fussiness. But who realises that? Every morning it is, “How has he slept, nurse?” “How is his little inside, nurse?” “How is his precious outside, nurse?” “Has that mark where the cat scratched him gone, nurse?” “Did I hear him crying at half-past four, nurse?” “Isn’the strangely silent this morning and puffy under the eyes, nurse?” and so forth, and so forth. I often wonder why my nurse hangs on at all. My nursemaid asked her the same question once, when she and my mother had differed about some little matter involving magnesia; and the nurse explained that she stopped for two reasons: because she got thirty pounds a year for doing so, and because she felt it would be next thing to murder to leave me until my mother knew her business. But, mind you, I want to be just to both my parents. My mamma can sing me to sleep with considerable skill; my papa can pick me up and fling me towards the ceiling with a nerve and strength that causes me infinite gratification when I am in the vein. But even upon a simple thing like that he exercises no discretion. There are occasional times when a chap doesn’t care to be flung up to the ceiling. How would he like it, for instance, the next moment after he had drunk his bottle, or whatever might be the equivalent with him? Then my mother will interfere with the temperature of my bath. She has a conviction, amounting to mania, that some day I shall be boiled alive or scalded to death. Her idea seems to be that I should sit quietlyand patiently while this painful operation was being performed, and suffer nobody to hear anything of it until I was cooked to a turn. The result of her alarm is that I rarely get my dip at a tidy temperature, though everybody likes a real hot bath now and again. Thank Heaven, they will grow older, these parents of mine. With years must surely come experience and wisdom and patience. At present—and I say it without the least animus—I would not give a broken rattle for the united knowledge of the pair of them.
It was of my first experiment in language that I set out to speak, when other grievances came between me and my subject. At ten months, or a shade over, I had amassed a vocabulary of three words—not that three words were of the slightest use in dealing with a woman like my mamma; but I did my best with them. The second and third were more or less trivial expressions of good feeling depending for their result on my inflection of voice; the first, of which I want more particularly to speak, created some sensation in its way and, indeed, produced a sort of result so startling that I have never to this moment entirely fathomed the significance of it. The matter fell out thus. After my ninth monthhad passed and nothing but my own language of laughter and tears had broken the silence, my father had a gloomy inspiration that I must be a dumb idiot, and that he and my mamma were jointly responsible for a being unlikely to add to the fame or repute of either. To calm their poor, foolish fears as soon as possible was obviously my duty under these circumstances, and I set about it. A brief, jocund monosyllable commended itself to me in this connection. I had heard my father use it under somewhat humorous circumstances, after falling over a chair on a night when he crept into my room to see me asleep. I was not asleep and we both laughed heartily at the time. He doubtless went away and forgot the incident; I, on the contrary, thought over it, practised the word, and tried it as a simple exclamation on my mother, doubting nothing that she would glory in it and perhaps reward me. Judge then of my surprise when she regarded me with horror and fear, almost dropped me back into my cradle, and burst into a flood of tears.
“Oh, baby! how could you?” she asked, between her sobs. “I’ve been praying for you to talk for months and months, and now—oh, it can’t be true—it can’t!”
Suspecting that my pronunciation was at fault, I uttered the word again with the greatest distinctness, whereupon my mamma became hysterical and fled from the nursery. She brought my father up when he came home, and I observed she was still in tears.
“Such—such a dreadful thing,” she said; “he’s spoken, James.”
“Good business!” exclaimed my father. “The little beggar isn’t dumb then, thank the Lord. What did he say? I’ll bet he tried to lisp your name.”
“He didn’t lisp at all—he spoke only too clearly. I don’t know how to tell you. He—he swore!”
And my mamma broke down entirely, while my papa gazed upon me with frank amazement.
“He swore?” repeated my papa, blankly. “What at? Why should he swear? I’m sure no kid ever had a better time.”
“To think that the very first word which has passed his lips——!” cried my mamma.
“But what did he swear at?”
“At me, his own loving mother. I just woke him up and danced him and cuddled him and asked him when he was going to bringjoy into my life and prattle sweet baby words into my ear. Then, without any warning, he said—he said, ‘Damn!’ And when I dropped him into his cradle and began to cry, he said it again!”
“Such a thing was never heard of in the whole history of infancy,” declared my father. “I see how it is; he’s picked it up from nurse. Nurse must go!”
“He might have heard you,” said my mother, reproachfully. “Youdosay it oftener than you think. But what will the career of a baby be who begins swearing before he can even walk straight? It’s horrible—it’s ruined my life!”
“I should be the last to swear before a child,” said my papa.
And then they went wrangling off. Not a jump to the ceiling did I get, not a smile, not a word of affection. Perhaps ingratitude in a parent is as painful a spectacle as a family furnishes. I kept my mouth shut for two months after that fiasco, but it made them mad to hear of the good things I said to nurse when they were not present. I will affirm of nurse that she is a capital listener, and lets me use what language I like, and never questionseither my statements or conclusions. But there, when all is said, a really capable nurse is a luxury, whereas parents appear to be a grim necessity, as far as I have yet been able to understand.