Part 22

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 it 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 the 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.

“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.”

“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 of 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 in 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!”

“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!”

A HINDERED HONEYMOON

The coffee and liquor stage of a long and elaborate luncheon having been reached, the rubicund and puffy personage occupying the chair at the head of the table—number three against the glass partition, east end, Savoy Grill-room—waved a stout hand, and instantly eight of the nimblest waiters—two to a double-leaved folding-screen—closed in upon the table with these aids to privacy. The rubicund personage, attired, like each of his male guests present, in the elaborate frock-coat, with white buttonhole bouquet, tender-hued necktie, pale-complexioned waistcoat, gray trousers, and shiny patent leathers inseparable from a wedding—the rubicund personage (who was no less a personage than Mr. Otto Funkstein, managing head of the West End Theatre Syndicate) got upon his legs, champagne-glass in hand, and proposed the united healths of Lord and Lady Rustleton.

“For de highly-brivileged nopleman who hos dis day gonferred ubon de brightest oond lofliest ornamend of de London sdage a disdinguished name oond an ancient didle I hof noding put gongradulations,” said Mr. Funkstein, balancing himself upon the tips of his patent-leather toes, and thrusting his left hand (hairy and adorned with rings of price) in between the jeweled buttons of his large, double-breasted buff waistcoat. “For de sdage oond de pooblic dot will lose de most prilliant star dot has efer dwinkled on de sdage of de West Enf Deatre I hof nodings poot gommiseration. As de manacher of dot blayhouse I feel vit de pooblic. As de friend—am I bermitted to say de lofing oond baternal friend of de late Miss Betsie le Boyntz?”—(tumultuous applause checked the current of the speaker’s eloquence)—“changed poot dis day in de dwingling of an eye—in de hooding of a modor-horn—by de machick of a simble ceremony at de Registrar’s—gonverted from a yoong kirl in de first dender ploom”—(deafening bravos hailed this flight of poetic imagination)—“de first dender ploom of peauty oond de early brime of chenius”—(the lady-guests produced their handkerchiefs)—“into a yoong vife, desdined ere long to wear upon her lofely prow de goronet of an English Gountess”—(Otto began to weep freely)—“a Gountess of Pomphrey.... Potztauzend! de dears dey choke me. Mine dear vriends, I gannot go on.”

Everybody patted Funkstein upon the back at once. Everybody uttered something consoling at an identical moment. Mopping his streaming features with the largest white cambric handkerchief ever seen, the manager was about to resume, when Lord Rustleton—whose tragic demeanor at the Registrar’s Office had created a subdued sensation among the officials there, whose deep depression during the wedding banquet had been intensified rather than alleviated by frequent bumpers of champagne, and who had gradually collapsed in his chair during Funkstein’s address until little save his hair and features remained above the level of the tablecloth, galvanically rose and, with a soft attempt to thump the table, cried: “Order!”

“Choke him off,” murmured a smart comedian to his neighbor, “for pity’s sake. He’s going to tell us how he threw over the swell girl he was engaged to a month before their wedding—for Petsie’s sake; and how he has brought his parents’ gray hairs with sorrow to the grave, and for ever forfeited the right to call himself an English gentleman. I know, bless you! I had it all from him last night at the Mummers’ Club, and this morning at his rooms in Wigmore Street.”

“Rustleton!”

“Order!” yelled Rustleton again.

“Order!” echoed Funkstein, turning a circular pair of rather bibulous and bloodshot blue eyes upon the protestant bridegroom. “Oond vy order?”

“Permimme to reminyou,” said Rustleton, with laborious distinctness, “that the present Head of my fammary, the Rironaurable the Earl of Pomphrey—in poinnofac’, my Fara—is at the present momen’ of speaking in the enjoymen’ of exhallent health, an’ nowistanning present painfully strained rela’ions essisting bi’ween us, I have no desire—nor, I feel convinned, has my wife, Lady Rustleton, any desire—to, in poinnofac’, usurp his shoes, or play leapfrog over his—in poinnofac’, his coffin. Therefore, the referen’ of the distinnwished gelleman who, in poinnofac’, holds the floor, to the coronet of a Countess in premature conneshion with the brow of my newly-marriwife I am compelled to regard as absorrutely ram bad form!”

“Tam bad _vat_?” shrieked Funkstein.

Rustleton leaned over the table. His eyes were set in a leaden-hued countenance. His hair hung lankly over his damp forehead. He nerved himself for a supreme effort. “Ununerrarrably ram baform!” he said, and with this polysyllabic utterance fell into a crystal dish of melted ice, and a comatose condition.

“Bad, bad boy!” said the recently-made Lady Rustleton, biting her notorious cherry underlip, and darting a brilliant glance at Funkstein out of her celebrated eyes as Rustleton was snatched from his perilous position by a strong-armed chorus beauty; and the low comedian, who had become famous since the production of _The Charity Girl_, dried the Viscount’s head with a table-napkin and propped him firmly in his chair.

“It is not de Boy, but de man dat drinks it,” giggled Funkstein, with recovered good temper. “Ach ja, oond also de voman. How many bints hof I not seen you....”

“That’ll do, thanks,” said the newly-made Viscountess, with her well-known expression of prim propriety. “Not so much reminiscing, you know; it’s what poor Tonnie called ‘ahem’d bad form’ just now, didn’t you, ducky?”

“Don’t call me rucky,” said the gentleman addressed, who was now rapidly lapsing into the lachrymose stage of his complaint. “Call me a mirerrable worm or a ‘fernal villain. I reserve both names. Doesn’ a man who has alienarid the affeshuns of his father, blirid his mother’s fonnest hopes, and broken his pli’rid word to a fonnanloving woman—girl, by Jingo——”

“Oh, do dry up about that now, darling!” said Lady Rustleton tartly. “I dare say she deserved what she got. What you have to remember now is that you’re married to me, and we shall be spinning away in the Liverpool Express in another hour, _en route_ for the ocean wave. I always _said_, when I _did_ have a honeymoon—a real one—I’d have it on the opening week of the production on a big Atlantic liner. And this is the trial voyage of the _Regent Street_, and she’s the biggest thing in ships afloat to-day. Do let’s drink her health!”

The toast was drunk with enthusiasm. Two waiters advanced bearing a wedding-cake upon a charger. The bride coyly cut a segment from the mass. It was divided and passed round. The ladies took pieces to dream on, the men shied at the indigestible morsels. Somebody had the bright idea of sending a lump to the chauffeur of the bridal motor-car, which had been waiting in the bright October sunshine, outside in the palm-adorned courtyard, since one o’clock. A _chassé_ of cognac went round. Rustleton was shaken into consciousness of his marital responsibilities and a fur-lined overcoat; everybody kissed Petsie; all the women cried, Petsie included—but not unbecomingly. Her bridal gown, a walking-costume of white cloth trimmed with silver braid, contained a thoroughly contented young woman; her hat, a fascinating creation, trimmed with a rose-colored bird, a _marquisette_, and a real lace veil, crowned a completely happy wife. Tonnie possessed nothing extraordinary in the way of good looks or good brains, it was true; but Tonnie’s wife was wealthy in these physical attributes. He possessed a high-nosed, aristocratic old fossil of a father, whose prejudices against a daughter-in-law taken from the lyric boards must be got over. He owned a perfectly awful mother, whose ancestral pride and whose three chins must—nay, should—be leveled with the dust. His sisters, the Ladies Pope-Baggotte, Petsie said to herself with a smile, were foewomen unworthy of such steel as is forged in the _coulisses_ of the musical comedy theaters. Yet should they, too, bite the dust. In a golden halo—partly hope, partly champagne—she saw Lady Rustleton sweeping, attired in electrifying gowns, onwards to the conquest of Society. The greengrocer’s shop in Camberwell, among whose cabbages and potatoes her infancy had been passed; the Board-School, on whose benches the first-fruits of knowledge had been garnered, were quite forgotten. Some other little circumstances connected with the Past were blotted from the slate of memory by the perfumed sponge of gratified ambition. She bore the deluge of rice and confetti with dazzling equanimity. She hummed “Buzzy, Buzzy, Busy Bee” as the motor-car, its chauffeur sorely embarrassed by a giant wedding favor, a pair of elderly slippers tied on the rear-axle, sped to Euston.

“I’ve got there at last,” said Petsie, as the Express ran into the Liverpool docks and toiling human ants began to climb up the ship’s gangways thrust downwards from the beetling gray sides of the biggest of all modern liners. “I’ve got there at last, I have, and in spite of Billy Boman. A precious little silly I must have been to take a hairdresser for a swell; but at seventeen what girl brought up in a Camberwell backstreet knows a paste solitaire from a real diamond, or a ready-made suit, bought for thirty bob at a Universal Supply Stores, from a Bond Street one? And if nice curly hair and a straight nose, a clear skin, and a good figure were all that’s wanted to make a gentleman, Billy could have sported himself along with the best. But now he’s dead, and I’ve married again into the Peerage, and I shall sit on the Captain’s right at the center saloon table, not only as the prettiest woman on board his big new ship, but as a bride and a Viscountess into the bargain. Wake up, Tonnie dear. You’ve slept all the way from Euston, and there’s a plank to climb.”

“Eh?” Tonnie stared with glassy eyes at the scurrying crowds of human figures, the piled-up trucks of giant trunks and dress-baskets soaring aloft at the end of donkey-engine cables, to vanish into the bowels of the marine leviathan. “Eh! What! Hang it! How confoundedly my head aches! Funkstein must have given us a brutally unwholesome luncheon. Why did I allow him to entertain us? I felt from the first it was a hideous mistake.”

“Why did you let the fellows persuade you to drink more of the Boy than is good for you, you soft-headed old darling?” Petsie gurgled. She smoothed the lank hair of her new-made spouse, and, reaching down his hat from the netting, crowned him with it, and bounded out of the reserved first-class compartment like a lively little rubber ball. “Here’s Timms, your man, with my new maid. No, thank you, Simpkins. You can take the traveling-bags. I may be a woman of title, but I mean to carry my jewel-case myself. Come along into the Ark, Tonnie, with the other couples. What number did you say belonged to our cabin, darling?”

“The Gobelin Tapestry Bridal Suite Number Four,” said Rustleton, with a pallid smile, as a white-capped, gold-banded official hurried forward to relieve the Viscountess of her coroneted jewel-case.

“How tweedlums!” sighed Petsie, retaining firm hold of the leather repository of her brand-new diamond tiara and necklace, not to mention all the rings and brooches and bangles reaped from the admiring occupants of the orchestra-stalls at the West End Theatre during the tumultuously successful run of _The Charity Girl_.

“It costs for the trip—five days, four hours, and sixteen minutes—between Queenstown and the Daunts Rock Lightship,” said Rustleton, with a heavy groan, “exactly two hundred and seventy-five guineas. Ha, ha!” He laughed hollowly.

“But why did you choose such a screamingly swell suite, you wicked, wasteful duckums?” cried the bride coquettishly, as their guide switched on the electric light and revealed a chaste and sumptuous nest of apartments in carved and inlaid mahogany, finished in white enamel with artistic touches of gold, and hung with tapestry of a greeny-blue and livid flesh-color.