The boy—for, as Tom reassured3 all sympathetic callers during the high-pressure first week of its existence, it undoubtedly4 was a boy—seemed on first sight rather smaller and spottier than the child of so many brilliant prospects5 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 disciple6 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 purely7 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, physically8 and mentally, a prodigy9 of infantile perfection. Her work was purely philanthropic, and if she consented to accept the inadequate10 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 devoted11 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 clog12 upon the expanding faculties13 of the child, and arrest mental progress. Besides, when maturity14 is reached, how pyfectly absurd it is to hear middle-aged15 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 vow16 never again, save in camera, to use the offending appellations17.
Miss Cooter was formally invested with Harold on 289the following morning. His ex-nurse, a plump, rosy18-cheeked country-woman, painfully devoid19 of culture, and absolutely unskilled in the repression20 of emotion, was relegated21, in floods of tears, to command of the laundry. Leila, compassionating22 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 stunned23 by her desertion to yield to sorrow, presently proclaimed his bereavement24 in a succession of ear-piercing shrieks25.
Applying both hands to his mouth, after the fashion of a speaking-trumpet27, 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 countenance28. He immediately held his breath, growing from crimson29 to purple and from purple to black as she delivered her inaugural30 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, dribbling31 mouth.
290“Your own sense of what is right and what is wrawng, dormant32 though it be at this vurry moment, I intend to awaken33 and——”
Harold, never before in his brief life harangued34 after this fashion, appeared to grasp already the idea that something was wrong. The expression of astonishment35 faded, his down-drooped mouth assumed the bell or trumpet-shape, and, rapidly doubling and undoubling himself with mechanical regularity36, he emitted the most astonishing series of sounds we had yet heard from him. No caresses37 were administered for the assuagement38 of his woe39, no broken English babbled40 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.”
“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 dubious42 Harold that the trumpet-shaped, nickel-silver-stoppered vessel43 tendered by his new guardian44 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 scowl45 that I have ever beheld46 upon a countenance of such pulpy47 immaturity48, applied49 himself to deglutition. Miss Cooter shook her head discouragingly.
“This child has a strawngly developed animal nature,” pronounced she—“a throwback to the primeval savage50, 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 softening51 and civilizing52 influences,” said she, “from this vurry moment. Vegetarian53 diet is what I should strawngly recommend.” Her eye doubtfully questioned the rapidly sinking level of the sterilized54 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 abacus55, and could work out sums in simple addition upon a patent hygienic slate56. All these facts Miss Cooter put before us with convincing eloquence57. Her language was well chosen, her scientific knowledge and technical skill quite appalling58. 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 disturbances59 appeared with distressing60 frequency. He was not precocious61 enough to be classified as abnormal, or sufficiently62 original to come under the heading “Atypical,” or old enough to tell lies, and so be dubbed63 imaginative. But that tertiary ancestor from whom, according to Miss Cooter, he derived64 his temperament65, must have possessed66 some strength of character, for from the beginning to the end, Harold’s strongest prejudice was manifested towards Miss Cooter, his most violent attachment67 in the direction of the banished68 Mary, for whom he howled at regular intervals69 until he forgot her, when he became reserved, distrustful, and apathetic70. 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 awakened71 in him a tepid72 interest. He was in texture73 flabby, and habitually74 wore an expression of languid indifference—intensified when Miss Cooter was delivering one of her oral lectures, to utter boredom75. Despite his sanitary76 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 infancy77 with passionate78 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 attenuated79 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 burrowed80 in tertiary strata81, and that the predatory parents of Baby Bunting must have been the primal82 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 rapture83. “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 formerly84 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 forefinger85 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 candor86, “I reckon because those were other people’s babies. This is mine!”
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1
tugged
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| v.用力拉，使劲拉，猛扯( tug的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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reassured
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| adj.使消除疑虑的；使放心的v.再保证，恢复信心( reassure的过去式和过去分词) | |
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4
undoubtedly
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| adv.确实地，无疑地 | |
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prospects
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| n.希望，前途(恒为复数) | |
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disciple
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| n.信徒，门徒，追随者 | |
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purely
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| adv.纯粹地，完全地 | |
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8
physically
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| adj.物质上，体格上，身体上，按自然规律 | |
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prodigy
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| n.惊人的事物，奇迹，神童，天才，预兆 | |
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inadequate
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| adj.(for,to)不充足的，不适当的 | |
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devoted
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| adj.忠诚的，忠实的，热心的，献身于...的 | |
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clog
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| vt.塞满，阻塞；n.[常pl.]木屐 | |
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13
faculties
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| n.能力( faculty的名词复数 )；全体教职员；技巧；院 | |
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14
maturity
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| n.成熟；完成；(支票、债券等)到期 | |
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middle-aged
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| adj.中年的 | |
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16
vow
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| n.誓(言)，誓约；v.起誓，立誓 | |
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appellations
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| n.名称，称号( appellation的名词复数 ) | |
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rosy
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| adj.美好的，乐观的，玫瑰色的 | |
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devoid
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| adj.全无的，缺乏的 | |
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20
repression
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| n.镇压，抑制，抑压 | |
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21
relegated
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| v.使降级( relegate的过去式和过去分词 )；使降职；转移；把…归类 | |
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22
compassionating
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| v.同情（compassionate的现在分词形式） | |
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23
stunned
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| adj. 震惊的，惊讶的 动词stun的过去式和过去分词 | |
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24
bereavement
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| n.亲人丧亡，丧失亲人，丧亲之痛 | |
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shrieks
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| n.尖叫声( shriek的名词复数 )v.尖叫( shriek的第三人称单数 ) | |
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26
queried
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| v.质疑，对…表示疑问( query的过去式和过去分词 )；询问 | |
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27
trumpet
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| n.喇叭，喇叭声；v.吹喇叭，吹嘘 | |
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28
countenance
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| n.脸色，面容；面部表情；vt.支持，赞同 | |
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29
crimson
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| n./adj.深(绯)红色(的)；vi.脸变绯红色 | |
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30
inaugural
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| adj.就职的；n.就职典礼 | |
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31
dribbling
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| n.（燃料或油从系统内）漏泄v.流口水( dribble的现在分词 )；（使液体）滴下或作细流；运球，带球 | |
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32
dormant
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| adj.暂停活动的；休眠的；潜伏的 | |
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33
awaken
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| vi.醒，觉醒；vt.唤醒，使觉醒，唤起，激起 | |
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34
harangued
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| v.高谈阔论( harangue的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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35
astonishment
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| n.惊奇，惊异 | |
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36
regularity
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| n.规律性，规则性；匀称，整齐 | |
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37
caresses
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| 爱抚，抚摸( caress的名词复数 ) | |
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38
assuagement
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| n.缓和；减轻；缓和物 | |
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39
woe
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| n.悲哀，苦痛，不幸，困难；int.用来表达悲伤或惊慌 | |
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40
babbled
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| v.喋喋不休( babble的过去式和过去分词 )；作潺潺声（如流水）；含糊不清地说话；泄漏秘密 | |
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41
interval
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| n.间隔，间距；幕间休息，中场休息 | |
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42
dubious
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| adj.怀疑的，无把握的；有问题的，靠不住的 | |
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43
vessel
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| n.船舶；容器，器皿；管，导管，血管 | |
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44
guardian
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| n.监护人；守卫者，保护者 | |
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45
scowl
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| vi.(at)生气地皱眉，沉下脸，怒视；n.怒容 | |
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46
beheld
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| v.看，注视( behold的过去式和过去分词 )；瞧；看呀；（叙述中用于引出某人意外的出现）哎哟 | |
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47
pulpy
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| 果肉状的，多汁的，柔软的； 烂糊； 稀烂 | |
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48
immaturity
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| n.不成熟；未充分成长；未成熟；粗糙 | |
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49
applied
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| adj.应用的；v.应用，适用 | |
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50
savage
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| adj.野蛮的；凶恶的，残暴的；n.未开化的人 | |
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51
softening
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| 变软，软化 | |
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52
civilizing
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| v.使文明，使开化( civilize的现在分词 ) | |
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53
vegetarian
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| n.素食者；adj.素食的 | |
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54
sterilized
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| v.消毒( sterilize的过去式和过去分词 )；使无菌；使失去生育能力；使绝育 | |
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55
abacus
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| n.算盘 | |
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56
slate
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| n.板岩，石板，石片，石板色，候选人名单；adj.暗蓝灰色的，含板岩的；vt.用石板覆盖，痛打，提名，预订 | |
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57
eloquence
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| n.雄辩；口才，修辞 | |
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58
appalling
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| adj.骇人听闻的，令人震惊的，可怕的 | |
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59
disturbances
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| n.骚乱( disturbance的名词复数 )；打扰；困扰；障碍 | |
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60
distressing
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| a.使人痛苦的 | |
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61
precocious
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| adj.早熟的；较早显出的 | |
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62
sufficiently
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| adv.足够地，充分地 | |
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63
dubbed
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| v.给…起绰号( dub的过去式和过去分词 )；把…称为；配音；复制 | |
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64
derived
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| vi.起源；由来；衍生；导出v.得到( derive的过去式和过去分词 )；（从…中）得到获得；源于；（从…中）提取 | |
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65
temperament
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| n.气质，性格，性情 | |
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66
possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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67
attachment
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| n.附属物，附件；依恋；依附 | |
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68
banished
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| v.放逐，驱逐( banish的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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69
intervals
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| n.[军事]间隔( interval的名词复数 )；间隔时间；[数学]区间；（戏剧、电影或音乐会的）幕间休息 | |
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70
apathetic
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| adj.冷漠的，无动于衷的 | |
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71
awakened
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| v.（使）醒( awaken的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）觉醒；弄醒；（使）意识到 | |
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72
tepid
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| adj.微温的，温热的，不太热心的 | |
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73
texture
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| n.(织物)质地；(材料)构造；结构；肌理 | |
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74
habitually
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| ad.习惯地，通常地 | |
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75
boredom
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| n.厌烦，厌倦，乏味，无聊 | |
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76
sanitary
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| adj.卫生方面的，卫生的，清洁的，卫生的 | |
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77
infancy
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| n.婴儿期；幼年期；初期 | |
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78
passionate
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，激昂的，易动情的，易怒的，性情暴躁的 | |
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79
attenuated
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| v.（使）变细( attenuate的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）变薄；（使）变小；减弱 | |
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80
burrowed
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| v.挖掘（洞穴），挖洞( burrow的过去式和过去分词 )；翻寻 | |
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strata
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| n.地层（复数）；社会阶层 | |
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82
primal
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| adj.原始的；最重要的 | |
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rapture
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| n.狂喜；全神贯注；着迷；v.使狂喜 | |
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84
formerly
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| adv.从前，以前 | |
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85
forefinger
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| n.食指 | |
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candor
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| n.坦白，率真 | |
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