CHAPTER VIII: CHILDREN
To anyone who has read the foregoing pages it will be evident that in starting housekeeping I was obsessed by two main ideas: one, that I was not to be a parasite; two, that I was to have the house to myself during certain portions of the day. Towards the end of my second year of marriage I began to pat myself on the back. But alas! It is this harmless exercise that seems to be more irritating to the gods than a thousand crimes.
Congratulate yourself upon anything, from the affection of a millionaire uncle down to a recent immunity from colds, and you are lost. I had won a position of—I won’t say mistress, but comparative director of my cook; the fish came at my call. Clara never finished one room at a time, though we had established as one rule of the game that, if I got to my sitting-room first, she could not begin dusting until she found all the thingsI had lost during the past twenty-four hours. While she did this I sat in another room and got on with my work, which had such an exasperating effect upon her nerves that after a time she forbore to follow me, however slowly and aggressively I walked upstairs.
As regards Mullins, the job gardener, I had got him into the habit of keeping entirely off the beds. He remained almost exclusively in the kitchen, where he did very little harm except to Ruth’s window-boxes, but she always said it was not much trouble to plant them again. She also said he was very useful in giving a hand with the knives, and in cleaning up. Asking Mullins to clean up anything seemed to me like inviting a baboon to tidy one’s wardrobe. In fact, the efficient female has scarcely spoken to me since she heard I allowed it. But then her life is a perpetual warfare. Leisure, self-indulgence, expense, moral latitude, wilfulness, tact, all these bright spirits, which are the making of any reasonable person’sday, fly before her as butterflies before a bird with a hungry family; it is a pretty sight.
But to return to my boast. I reviewed these achievements with my mind’s eye. I was proud, and there was an end of it. Within a few months I no longer knew the meaning of leisure, and I had become a parasite, living on the habits of my son Tom and his nurse. All the other people in the house preserved their independence. When it became a question who should make the barley-water, it was my time, not Ruth’s nor Clara’s nor the nurse’s, that was wasted. Ruth, without taking her eyes off the range, said it would be better for anything of the sort to be made in the nursery for fear there should be any mistake. Nurse, without interrupting her work, wanted to know who was to watch the pan while she was folding the things in the night-nursery. It cost me a valuable summer’s morning to find a place in the domestic machinery where that pan might sit and boil without disorganising the day’s work.
Suppose a railway company, having completed all their arrangements and got everything into working order, were to be suddenly informed that the Government had decided to run a picture palace in the middle of their head office! I thought of this, and decided that the difficulties of such a situation would be a mereTit-Bitsproblem compared to my task of fitting in a nursery amongst Ruth, Clara, and Mullins.
I awoke regularly at three in the morning, to find my brain already up and about, sorting and rejecting answers to such questions as these: “Who is to wash the kitchen tea-things while Clara is amusing the baby when some one calls on nurse’s day out?” or “What about methylated spirits for boiling in the nursery? One cannot be always running to and fro from the kitchen.”
All day long I was pursued by this ceaseless boiling. “What about boiling the milk?” “The milk has boiled over.” “How shall we manage about boiling the clothes?” “I couldn’t get the water toboil.” “You couldn’t boil vegetables in that pan.” “It has to be brought to the boil before you can do anything.” “Boiled beef would come less in the long run.” When Ruth made this statement I suggested that beef could hardly come less than Jones’s mutton did, as that always made a point of never coming at all whenever it could, and if there was going to be a longer run than usual before we got it we had better order something else at once. She replied that in that case a nice piece of boiled fish would be as nice as anything, at which, being a little over-wrought, I wept, and Ruth was extremely kind, and said she would just pop the kettle on to boil. And all this time Tom lay like a log and did nothing. I was dependent upon him for everything. My engagements and my peace of mind hung upon how he felt, and what his Dr. Boswell of a nurse alleged that he thought. The first thing he did was to put an end to my letter-writing, the second was to break up my quiet evenings with games, his thirdenterprise, his masterpiece of iniquity, was to affiance Ruth to Mullins. At first I had been dense enough not to trace his hand in this calamity, but by and by it dawned upon me, and I questioned Ruth.
“Yes, m’m,” she replied, “things is not the same where there is children. You don’t seem to have the place to yourself in the same way as where there is only a lady.”
“I beg your pardon, Ruth,” I interrupted, “I didn’t quite catch what you said just then. Did you mean that master Tom takes too much upon himself? I don’t leave much to him, really.”
“Oh, no, m’m,” said Ruth, “not at all. It wasn’t that. But where there is children there is so much that hasgotto be done.”
“Yes,” I said thoughtfully, “I see your point. The same thing has occurred to me. He gives orders, doesn’t he? Is rather emphatic—is that what you meant?”
“Oh, well, m’m,” she replied, “of course you would give the orders just the same in the nursery as elsewhere. It’s your place,and I like to have you do it. I’m sure I should be the last to wish to direct. Indeed, I shouldn’t care to take any responsibility. But where there is children you can’t pick and choose what is to be done in the same way as where there is only a lady, can you, m’m? They have to be considered, don’t they?”
“Yes, Ruth,” I said, “I quite see your idea, and I think you are right to marry, you will feel much freer.”
But I had not the least intention that she should marry yet. Before the month was up she had decided that Mullins could hardly give her, as yet, the comforts to which she was accustomed, therefore the marriage was postponed. Still, I was conscious henceforth of the sword over my head, and it was all Tom’s fault.
He had already annoyed us all by not being born on the day originally fixed. He seemed preoccupied and in a hurry when he arrived, and of course the house was all upset. He made the best of things, waitingpatiently on the sofa as if we had made the muddle, whereas, in fact, he was entirely to blame. Anne, two years later, behaved quite differently. She entered the date in her pocket-book, stopped glory-trailing when the clock struck, and came down buttoning on a pink skin several sizes too large.
I was sorry for Tom from the bottom of my heart. He had some natural dignity, which he needed in the presence of the women who preyed upon his person and searched mercilessly for his soul. They commented upon his personal appearance, his habits, and his human weaknesses, until I blushed for them and for him. They made him look absurd in the street, dressed in a shawl pinned tightly round him in the shape of a Virginia Ham, and a drunken-looking bonnet that lay cocked over one eye, leaving a draughty space at the back of the neck. When he laughed they either attributed it to a defective digestion, or put feeble jokes in his mouth.
“I’m a bad boy,” he says, Nurse Boswellinterpreted, “and I’m going to kick my little heels, I am, and splash the soapy water in their faces!”
When he broke down and wept from sheer despair of ever making them understand, they took him to the blinding glare of a sunny window and threw him about until he was obliged to feign indisposition in order to make them put him down. He came to me about it sometimes, and I said: “All right, just lie down quietly, and I will say you are resting if they come.”
Just as he was comfortably settled a cheerful voice and clapping of hands was heard at the door, and in came nurse.
“Well, I never,” she exclaimed, “the idea! Who took him up? Now then, master, you just come with me and get dressed, and we’ll go off and get a mouthful of fresh air,” and out would come the rickety bonnet with the draught, and the Virginia Ham shawl, and off they went to harden themselves in a biting east wind. Tom told me afterwards that they met halfa dozen women, all of whom went into the grossest personal details about his anatomy, his weight, and what he ate. The men tactfully avoided him, for which he thanked them. Those who had sons of their own knew about the bonnet and were sorry, whilst those who had not just saw him as a sort of egg, and put off his acquaintance until he should be in a fit state to be recognised.
Anne was quite different even as a baby. She humped her back and made faces at the ladies. Soon she and I combined to protect Tom in his encounters with the female sex. We exposed their folly and duplicity in a shameless way for fear lest they should take possession of his heart with their forged certificates of high-mindedness. That our claims to integrity were no better was not to the point. We, at least, loved him and should only mislead him for his good.
Tom, like the rest of his sex, was disposed to respect the authority against which he battled so long as he believed in it. Heoften said, “Yes, nurse,” quite respectfully, until Anne came. She soon settled that.
“You go and ask nurse if she loves you,” she said, “it’s all rot her saying the sweets are eaten up, they’re in her drawer.”
Of course Tom came back with a handful of chocolates to divide between himself and Anne, having left another illusion behind him.
We had great difficulty at first with nurses. Personally I cannot bear the popsy-wopsy nurse who is so popular with good mothers. When I was interviewing nurses for Tom, I brought him into the room and left him to decide. He soon weeded out the sheep from the goats. If the woman exclaimed “Bless him! where is he?” I caught Tom’s eye, and we said we were so sorry but we were already in treaty with some one whom we thought would be suitable. We dismissed dozens in that way for the same fault. I have been in other people’s nurseries, and seen children huddled and poked and blessed and poppeted into their clothes, marchedoff giggling, and brought back pouncing, their words overridden by ejaculations and clatter. Their upbringing reminds me of the comic pudding in the pantomime that is tossed up and beaten down, rolled in a dish with the cat, and thrown at the policeman, all to the accompaniment of a blaring orchestra and incessant conversation. I chose my present nurse on account of her opening remark to Tom. “Come here, boy,” she said, and Tom went, and has remained ever since.
There were a great number of things she “didn’t hold with,” but they were not matters I was tenacious about myself, neither was Tom, so we let them drop. Later on I found that a certain amount of compromise was effected, such as a pair of dried ears exchanged for a short story before the fire, or some real tea offered for a quiet afternoon with a scrap-book; that was on days when Tom had Satan in one pocket and an Angel of Goodness in the other. He was a simple creature, and but for Anne would have kept his illusions much longer than he did. He thought thatwhen he gave up his time to help in laying the nursery tea, things got on quicker than they would otherwise have done; that it saved nurse trouble to hand the spoons to him one by one and put them straight afterwards. Anne found for herself an occupation that she preferred.
One of nurse’s articles of faith was that children should have their own place in the household and keep to it. There was a place for every one in her picture. The servants in the kitchen, the children in the nursery, the master in his study, and the mistress in the drawing-room, also pervading the whole house as, in a landscape, the sun and the blizzard pervade fields, lakes, woods, and mountains alike. To have the children the centre of general attention or running about the house would have seemed to her as revolutionary as trees planted on a dinner-table or poultry at large on a cricket-field. Tom’s instincts led him to fall very easily into his place in the domestic world. He was always a mere nut in a vast mechanismwhose existence he dimly apprehended; he was of importance inasmuch as the great machinery might go out of gear for want of the trustworthy service of the least of its parts. Anne thought of herself—so far as she thought at all—as a spark from a divine fire, sent to illumine the musty darkness in which parents, domestic servants, visitors, and tradesmen had hitherto lived. This divine spark must be kept alive. She encouraged us all to blow, and herself pirouetted helpfully in the draught of our exertions. Nurse never devised things for the children to do, any more than the nervous system of the body devises occupations for the other parts. I understand that it allows some activities to pass unnoticed, inhibits others, and encourages some, but it does not suggest much. We all had our work to do, and when nurse was out of order, whether through ill-health or disapproval, strange distempers appeared in our conduct. Tom and Anne quarrelled. Ruth took to sending up twice a week “that sloppy hotpot which I can’t think is goodfor the children.” Clara left the clean things from the wash downstairs, “getting in all the way of the dust, and I with the stockings yet to darn.” Even the fish surpassed itself in evil-doing. Of course it “never came,” we were used to that; but on these fatal occasions it was full of bones when it did come, and “had nothing on it.”
The children never got on with the efficient female, Tom the least of the two, owing to his illusions. Not that he disliked her, he was always patient with women, and prepared to think they were doing their best (until Anne explained to him just what they were doing), but the efficient female got in his way, and made him hot. She brought him occupations when he was already busy with string. They were always in boxes labelled “The Young So-and-so” (none of them people whom he liked to be). He never wanted to be a young designer or penman or weaver. If she had brought materials for the young plumber—a pound of lead for instance, or that delightful gas thing on astick that makes a flame when you blow—it would not have been so bad; he could have mended the hole in nurse’s boot, or stopped up the place under the coal-scuttle where the mouse came. The efficient female believed in Madame Montessori’s Kindergarten apparatus in the same spirit as the poor believe in the efficacy of a “bottle from the doctor’s.” She brought us puzzles over which we all tore our hair in the evenings. Matching colours became an obsession, and James began to button and unbutton his waistcoat at dinner until I had to speak to him on account of Clara. Finally nurse came to the rescue, as usual, and inhibited our desire to cultivate our senses. She complained that Tom had awakened her by trying to fit each of his fingers successively into her open mouth, and that he was quite feverish because none of them fitted exactly. The efficient female told me what a great success the system had been with her children; but the truth is that I do not like her children. They have their hair tied in an unbecoming way,they can tell you the names of all the flowers in the garden—even the flowering shrubs which no decent person ever remembers—they know what makes the hen lay eggs, and why their own tears are salt. When I was young, we knew less about ourselves and more about other people. We ranged over the whole field of history, picking out gems of character here and there. Quintus Curtius, Noah, Henry the Eighth and his six wives, Napoleon in the retreat from Moscow (there was a picture of it in the nursery, with snow, and vultures, and corpses lying across broken cannon), Marius amongst the ruins of Carthage, the Queen of Sheba, King Alfred, Livingstone, Cardinal Wolsey. We remembered none of their dates, neither was their history correlated with other subjects, but we shall have to mix them up in heaven. So why not now? One has friends of various ages, yet it never occurs to me to mention: “Of course you were born before the death of Gladstone, were you not? I want to introduce Mrs. Ingram, born 1856, contemporary with Mrs.Maybrick, the famous poisoner; in politics, Churchill, Chamberlain, and Balfour; science, Marconi and the close of the reign of Lister; saw the dawn of motor-cars, and remembers the introduction of the telephone.” Or, “Miss Black, born shortly before the accession of Lloyd George, witnessed the ascent of the first aeroplane, and took a prominent part in the famous raid by Suffragettes on the House of Commons.” A correlated introduction would, I imagine, be made like this: “Miss Black, a descendant of the Black Prince, has crossed the Black Sea twice, wears black stockings, and is interested in nigger minstrelsy.”
My whole sympathy is with that little boy who, having learned the anatomy of the snowdrop, washed-in the snowdrop in bold outline, modelled the snowdrop, sung a song about the snowdrop, found on the map the different countries where it grew, and learned the best of those passages in literature where it is mentioned, at last flung the detestable little flower to the ground, exclaiming heartily, “Damn the snowdrop!”