The Real Victory by Elna Harwood Wharton

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Oct 12, 1916

The Real Victory

By Elna Harwood Wharton

MRS. BOURNE sighed wistfully as she stood at the door of Garry's untidy room. The scene she had just passed through with her son had taxed her strength of will to the uttermost. As every mother and teacher knows, the act of disciplining another human being takes something out of the reserve store of force that is difficult to put back. A cataloguing glance around the room, with its tumbled, unmade bed, littered desk and window seat, bore evidence of the need for still further firmness with her son.

“Poor little fellow!” she thought, as she stripped the covers over the foot of the bed and opened the windows. “What rigid, inflexible lessons life has in store for him! And all I can do is to try to strengthen him, to make him learn that his tasks must not be put off without facing the consequences. I hate to have him lose even five minutes of the short afternoon sunshine to straighten his room, but it’s the best way.”

On this particular morning Garry had been unusually difficult. He came down to breakfast begging off from school. “I’ve got a headache and a pain in my side, and I don’t feel well,” he complained. His grandmother had openly sympathized. A threat of castor oil exposed the excuse as “five-minutes-after-nine sickness.” Garry then pleaded to be protected from big Bill Snedden, who had threatened to “beat him up.” Garry’s mother explained firmly why she would not interfere in matters between one boy and another. Finally the truth came out. He hadn’t done his home work! He had been reading a book. He would be kept in, and his relentless parent had packed him off to school with the unbelievable desire to have just that punishment administered.

It was Garry’s early morning duty to make his bed and put his belongings in order. From the time he had had a room to himself, Mrs. Bourne had insisted on this point.

“Bed making isn’t boy’s work,” the elder Mrs. Bourne said scornfully, when this requirement was announced. “You’ll make a sissy of him, Adelaide.”

“Boys at military schools have to make their beds,” retorted Garry’s mother. “There’s nothing effeminate about a military academy or a naval training ship.”

“Well, it’s menial labor. I never allowed my son to do anything menial.”

“You must remember it was easier, when Bruce was little, to get hired help, Mother Bourne,” Adelaide tried to conclude the argument pleasantly. “Nowadays we keep one kitchen maid where you were used to a large staff; and by the time Garry marries, it looks as if there would be no domestic servants to be had. Anyway, it’s good for him to be responsible for one definite duty.”

She persisted in what she felt was the right discipline for her own children. As each one was promoted to a separate room, the care of personal possessions had to be assumed. Comparatively rare now were mornings like these, when one of the rooms was left untouched because of the inflexibility of the school hour. Her course of action was always the same. She simply closed the door on the disorder as she was doing at present, and confronted the offender with the unfinished task at half past three.

All her married life Adelaide Bourne had gone about, picking up things for her husband. Notwithstanding her adoration for Bruce, their instant comprehension of each other’s motives and actions, their mutual interdependence and support in matters of the spirit, habits uncorrected in boyhood still clung to her husband in his maturity. She found her choice to lie between continual petty nagging and quietly straightening up what he had left about, as his mother had always done.

“He’s a grown man,” she decided. “I married him just as he was, for other qualities, and I’m not going to attempt to make him over. It’s too late to change him without spoiling the whole atmosphere of our home. He really doesn’t mean to make work, but his habit is stronger than his powers of observation.”

So she went on without comment, emptying ashes from his after-dinner coffee cups, rescuing neckties from beneath chair rockers, sorting and pigeon-holing letters and papers she found on the library table. She made up her mind that, whatever other faults her boys developed, no woman should have to put their dirty laundry away or straighten their bureaus and desks or scrub the wash basin after them. There was plenty of time between dressing and school for a child to put one room in order if some one else did the actual sweeping.

Grandmother Bourne was an old-fashioned housekeeper. Not to have every corner of one’s house immaculate before noon was somehow a disgrace. She had always prided herself on being able to exhibit any room in her house to any visitor at any time. Adelaide’s ways were past her comprehension.

She opened her door abruptly as Adelaide, coming from Garry’s room, was going through the second-floor hall toward the sewing-room.

“Won’t you let me make Garry’s bed this morning?” she urged, as Adelaide opened up her sewing-machine. “It makes the house look so untidy,” she added.

It was an old bone of contention between them. The question was asked and the same answer given every time the exigencies of the day forced one of the children to school without completing his or her task.

“I’ve shut the door, Mother Bourne. No one is coming here today; but even if there were, Garry must do his room himself.”

“I could do it so easily,” lingering with her hand on the closed door of Garry’s room. “He never makes it right.”

“O Mother Bourne,” cried Adelaide almost impatiently, “when will you understand? Garry needs the discipline of having to do it himself. He’s got to learn that putting things off won’t do him any good. He’s got to go through one trial after another till the lesson sinks in. It isn’t half so important to have the room tidy as it is to have him go through the motion of making it tidy. Don’t you, can’t you see?”

“No, I don’t. I think you’re terribly hard on the poor little fellow. And some day he’ll hate you for making his life just a round of chores. You can’t make a boy a gentleman by giving him servant’s work to do. You’re the most unsympathetic mother I ever saw. He’ll come home sick—you mark my word!”

Adelaide winced. She bent over her sewing-machine, tears of humiliation springing to her eyes. She wanted to snap back a stinging reply embodying her own ideas of the nobility of all willing helpfulness. Argument with Grandmother Bourne, however, was always

futile, and she went on sewing, the flood of words held heroically back.

The exertion of disciplining Garry was always exhausting to her. Why did it have to be complicated by the need of resisting the senseless interference of another will? It was a difficult problem. It simply meant a continual postponement of results with the boy, a succession of beginnings leading nowhere.

She was not afraid Garry would hate her. He was too fine for that. He might contest her ordinances; struggle to have his own way, openly defy her authority, as he had that time he played in the woods all day instead of going to school, but his love she would keep.

She was chiefly concerned on the present occasion as to what frame of mind Garry would be in when he got home. In spite of her determination that Garry must stay in after school and make up the lost work, she could not help feeling that an injustice beyond her control was somehow being inflicted on her boy. It lay in the necessity for any home work on top of the long school day. It was a question of the entire system of education as then conceived. There ought to be time enough in five hours to teach them, she was sure, without this additional burden that robbed the children of their pitifully few hours of out-of-doors activity. She was not at all certain that Garry wasn’t getting more real education out of browsing in history, natural history, and literature than the virtuous little boys who never failed to do the examples assigned. Still—the teacher must be upheld—

“I believe I’ll bring it up at the next parents’ and teachers’ meeting,” she reflected. “Of course it’s Garry’s misfortune to be so far along in the school where the lessons are piled on, but there’s something fundamentally wrong that ought to be changed. Poor little Garry; he’s sure to come home today late and tired, cross as two sticks; and after all, it’s not really his fault. It seems to me so many mothers’ problems are dilemmas like this—issues where discipline must be enforced, but where something bigger and deeper lies underneath, all twisted and unfair.”

She went on with the day’s miscellaneous tasks, Garry’s shortcomings and the various remedies for them uppermost in her mind. Garry was so much more complex than either Alice or Bud. In a way she believed he would have a much bigger future than either of the others, if she could but tender him the right mother-help.

Garry did not justify either his mother’s or his grandmother’s prophecies. With the strange perversity of childhood, he came home singing. His sweet little soprano voice had but lately found itself, or, rather, found its relation to his ears.

“Muddy! Muddy! Where are you?” he called through the house, abandoning the school bag in the middle of the hall. “What can I have to eat? I’m starving hungry.” As Mrs. Bourne appeared, smiling, on the staircase, Garry rushed up to her with a bear hug as devouring and conclusive as Bud’s. “O Muddy, my composition was the best in the class! And I got a hundred in arithmetic.”

“How about the home work?”

“Oh, I stayed in and did it. Didn’t take me fifteen minutes. We’ve got a lot of home work for tomorrow, mother, so you be sure to remind me to come in at half past five and begin.” As he talked, Garry was stuffing into his mouth the generous slices of bread and butter Mrs. Bourne had cut for him. There was a big red apple on the table, too. He put that in his pocket.

“You couldn’t spare another for Bill Snedden, could you, mother?” he asked eagerly. “Bill’s going to show me his cave—that is, if you’ll let me go?”

Garry’s mother smiled. “Then he didn’t beat you up?”

“Oh, no—I guess he forgot all that talk. I lent him my penknife at recess, and got him interested in my carpenter things, like you said. Bill’s a fine friend when you know him right.”

Mrs. Bourne produced a second apple, holding it back almost imperceptibly, however. Before the words were formed, Garry had anticipated them.

“I’m going right up now to do my room, Muddy.” He put up his face for a sudden impulsive kiss, and went bounding up the stairs.

“He won’t do it thoroughly,” thought his mother, glowing under the rare manifestation of affection, “but the will to do it is there now, and nothing else matters.” In an incredibly short time Garry was down again.

“Now, may I go, mother? Nothing really takes long when you want to get it done, does it, Muddy? And oh, Muddy,” turning back from the door and putting both arms around her neck, “I want to ask you something—as a favor. Please don’t think you have to give me a dollar or any kind of present for my birthday next week, the same as you did for Bud. I’ve got tools and lots of things, and I’d rather you didn’t spend the money till the house is all paid for!” A final hug and kiss, and Garry was tearing down the road waving his apples, two at once, at the waiting Bill Snedden.

His mother followed his lithe little form with glistening eyes. This, of course, was his inarticulate boy-way of saying, “I’m sorry about this morning.” But to think that the child had paid attention to their anxious, half-veiled discussions of ways and means! That was his father in him, thoughtful, self-denying. She hugged his precious, unselfish words to her heart; they meant to her a priceless jewel in the treasure chest of the future for her first-born.

“The real Garry’s as fine and sweet as his father,” was her thought. “From me he gets this silly handicap—his tendency to glue his eyes to his books and let lessons and more important things go. And the school’s to blame for much of this morning’s stupid misery. There shouldn’t be home work at all. The rest of him—the heedlessness and circuitousness and antipathy to the wash basin—that’s just plain boy!” Mrs. Bourne was hardly to be blamed if in her exultation of spirit over her boy she was tempted and fell.

She slipped into Garry’s room and remade the lumpy bed. She hung up the clothes that had been knocked to the closet floor in his haste to get his pajamas out of sight. She pulled the desk from the wall, and picked up the mass of papers that had fallen—or been thrown—behind it.

“Adelaide,” came a querulous voice at the door, “where are you? I just wanted to tell you I saw Garry going off down the road a few minutes ago with that Snedden boy.”

“Yes, I know, Mother Bourne; I said he could.” Adelaide hastily put behind her the odd stocking she had fished from under Garry’s bed. It was one thing to let Mother Bourne interfere with Garry’s disciplining, and quite another to improve upon his handiwork unobserved.

“Well, I certainly don’t see what you can be thinking of,” snapped the older woman as she slammed her own door.—Elna Harwood Wharton, in the Delineator for September.