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What Really Happened

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Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Sep 21, 1916

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 93, No. 47.

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What Really Happened

By Dorothy Canfield

Once upon a time there was a little boy. He was born with all sorts of advantages, among which were a number of very desirable forbears, from whom he inherited a good brain, an excellently strong body, and a very delicately and accurately adjusted set of nerves. At first, when he was a little, little baby, there was, of course, as with all little babies, just Himself, and nothing else of any importance. But by the time he was three years old, there was Himself and the World; largely Himself, of course, with the world for a treasure house from which he incessantly fished out new impressions and sensations for his lively, strong intelligence to arrange in order. He found this the most fascinating occupation possible—as indeed it is.
Also he found that by watching grown-ups, he could widen his ideas immensely on things to do. Grown-ups were always doing something different. He watched all the members of his family, and immediately tried to copy their actions. This was considered extremely entertaining. When he put a spoon in his cup of milk, and stirred with exactly the gesture his father used in stirring sugar into coffee, his mother cried out, “Oh, isn’t he the most adorable little monkey?” and kissed him a great many times. And when he stuck his curly hair full of his mother’s hairpins, she led him all around the house to show him to his aunt and his father, and even to the cook, so they could laugh with her over his funny little notions. Although he had no idea what was amusing, he laughed, too, with all his little face, because he could no more help imitating the cheerful, laughing expressions about him than he could help copying everything else he saw.
He had been three years old for a few weeks when, one morning, his mother said to his father that they really must have the guestroom repapered and done over. “I’ve chosen a rather expensive bordered kind of paper,” she went on, “because I can get some perfectly fascinating imported French cretonne to match—the kind that has those adorable little wreaths that you cut out and appliqué on white. I thought I’d do the whole room over fresh. Bella Parsons is coming to visit me next month, and since she married into that wealthy Parsons family, she’s terribly critical.”
The little boy was playing with a woolly lamb on wheels and wasn’t paying any attention, because he thought what his mother was saying wasn’t worth listening to. And he was quite right.
Although his father didn’t say anything, you could tell by the expression on his face that he had listened. He got up from the table, put on his overcoat, and went away. What he said was: “Good-by, dear. Good-by, Buster-boy,” as he kissed them both. What he thought was that he guessed he’d better be getting along to business to make the money to pay for the wall paper and the cretonne to match, which were to impress his wife’s old acquaintance.
So it was that after a while two strange men came to the house with a stepladder, and a long board, and a big pail, and rolls of paper, and a little roller-thing, and ever so many such fascinating objects, and papered the guestroom all afresh. The little boy didn’t like strangers very well, and he felt rather shy of these overalled men whose faces didn’t look at all like those of his much-educated family. But the men were so interesting he couldn’t keep away from them. He loitered around the door to the guestroom and looked shyly in; and when he found that the men were too busy to grin at him, or chuck him under the chin, or ask him what his name was,—when they knew already,—or poke him in the ribs, the way most of the much-educated callers did, he stood boldly in the doorway, with his chubby legs wide apart, and watched them, his eyes shining like stars with interest.
The joy of this adventure so emboldened him that when two strange sewing women came to the house, after a brief preliminary survey of them from a distance, he took his little stool to the guestroom and sat down to watch them as they worked. They paid as little attention to him as the overalled men had done, and they were even more interesting. In fact, he had never seen any grown-ups amuse themselves so sensibly. Why, anybody would like to do what they did! They had beautiful shining scissors, which flashed in the light, and hour after hour they played with the scissors; they cut and snipped and slashed away at the crisp cretonne. They never seemed to grow tired of it, for as soon as they had cut up into little bits all they had in their laps, they reached down to the big pile of the stuff, pulled up a fresh supply, and began again, while their scissors blades made the most delightful, thin, whispery sound as they sheared through the fabric. The little boy’s strong, eager fingers fairly itched to do it, too; but they were quite strange women, and he felt too shy to ask them to lend him their scissors.
At noon the women opened lunch boxes and began to eat their lunches, while the little boy was taken downstairs to eat a carefully balanced meal, which gave him exactly the food elements he needed. His mother was very careful about his food, and was bringing him up according to the rules of an excellent book on child feeding. His grandmother said it was all nonsense, but it really was a great success. The little boy had never had a single stomach ache in all his life, and—although she wouldn’t admit it—this was something before unheard of for his grandmother.
His mother was rather silent and abstracted during this luncheon. She was figuring up on the back of an envelope the cost of the numerous yards of imported French cretonne, and adding to it the considerable expense of having the two sewing women cut it all up and then sew it together again. Although she persistently recalled to mind that nothing was more chic than to have wreaths of French cretonne appliquéd on curtains and bedspreads, and on chair covers and bureau covers, the sum total of her calculations made her frown and forget to enjoy her luncheon. She also almost forgot the little boy, although with a few cells of her brain she automatically told him to chew his food fine and not to take large mouthfuls. She was very careful about his eating, and anxious to lay the foundations of future health for him.
After luncheon the little boy had to have his nap; and after his nap a young lady working her way through college came and took him for a walk. His mother followed closely the excellent advice of her book on the care of children, and always provided for a daily outdoor walk for her little son. The arrangement also left her own afternoon free.
So it happened that he did not go back to the guestroom until the next morning, and then things had changed. The two women were sewing now as fast as they could. They were sewing upon white cloth the little snips and pieces of the cretonne they had cut up. There was a certain pleasant monotony about the way their needles flashed in and out, but nothing to compare with the delicious sight and sound of their scissors in the cloth.
After a while he saw the scissors lying on a chair, and very shyly put out his hand to them. The older woman glanced at him, guessed that probably he wouldn’t run the points into his eye if he sat still, and made no objection when he picked up some scraps of the cretonne from the floor.
The little boy did not care what she might think, and did not pay any attention whatever to her. The scissors blades were very sharp, the cretonne was very crisp, and the combination was to a little boy of three what perfectly performed Wagnerian music is to a musician—a joyous riot of delight. He was a clever little boy, and he very soon mastered the necessary motions, although he had never been allowed to hold scissors before. His thumb and forefinger opened and shut, opened and shut, till his hand ached. But he did not know that it ached, because he was so entranced with the resultant sensations. To see the cloth fall apart into two halves before the onslaught of his blades, to see the clear, sharp line of cleavage where an instant before there had been none, to feel the threads of the firmly woven fabric give way as he contracted his muscles—no yachtsman on a day of brisk wind and blowing spume ever braced himself to more tingling, tantalizing pleasure!
After a time the older woman looked down at him as he worked, chewing his tongue, breathing hard, his head on one side. As she saw his shining eyes and brilliant cheeks, she laughed and said: “My! don’t they get a lot of comfort out of their little tricks? Ain’t it funny how crazy children are about cutting with scissors? When they get about so old, every last one of them has to have the cutting-out fever.”
Then came the not-to-be-avoided sequence of luncheon, nap, and walk. The walk was longer than usual. It was late when the little boy came in, and he was very hungry and tired, but he started at once upstairs to the guestroom to find the strange women and their scissors. He tried to run up, but his legs felt so heavy that he had to toil along, one step at a time. But his grandfathers had handed on to him plenty of grit and perseverance, and he never thought of giving up to his fatigue baby fashion, not even when his mother, coming downstairs as he went up, offered to carry him down and hold him in her lap. He shook his head and plodded on, set upon accomplishing without any assistance what he had begun.
It was getting a little dark in the guestroom, and the little boy didn’t like shadowy corners very well, but he wasn’t a “fraid cat,” and he went boldly in while he mastered his fear, as one of his grandfathers had gone forward on a battle field in the Civil War.
But nobody was in the guestroom. The strange women had gone. The little boy was bitterly disappointed, and drew down the corners of his mouth. But just then he saw the scissors, bright in the dusk, still lying on the chair, and as his eyes grew used to the twilight, he could see across the bed great quantities of the stuff the women had been sewing. It was all right, after all. With the scissors in his hand, he climbed up on the bed, and gathering into his little lap an armful of the material, he set to work manfully.
Of course he couldn’t do it as fast as the women had, but it really went very well, he thought, breathing hard, and cutting and slashing. The material the women had sewed their pieces upon was thinner than the cretonne, and having it in such big sections made cutting easier for him. None of the length of the big scissors was wasted on air, as when he had cut the scraps, but every inch of them counted as the blades buried themselves to the nose. When he cut through a part where some cretonne had been sewed on, it was harder, and he had to grip the handles hard—and then, all of a sudden, clip! he would be through, and tearing out over a big section of the white.
Steps came down the hall, but he did not hear them, happy and absorbed as he was. He was really very tired by this time, but he would not give up. He chewed his tongue as he worked, and his eyes were like stars, they shone so brilliantly.
His mother came to the doorway, and seeing him there in the dusk, said, “What are you doing here, darling?” But he did not hear her. He had just mastered the technique of making a really long slash with the scissors, quite as the women had. For an instant his mother strained her eyes to see what her little son was doing. Then she pressed a button, a prettily shaded lamp blossomed into light, and—she saw what he was doing. For just long enough for the little boy to turn about and see her face, she stood perfectly motionless.
She thought she was standing safe and sheltered in the guestroom of her pleasant, tasteful house, but she was really standing under the great windy sky of eternity, facing two diverging roads, which went farther and farther apart as they stretched before her into infinity.
At the sight of his mother’s eyes and mouth, the little boy’s happy, tired, triumphant face was stricken into panic terror. What horrible, unthinkable thing had happened to make her look so? He screamed and ran toward her for protection. Yes, toward her. He was only three, you know, and he still felt his mother to be what saints feel God to be.
And this is what happened. In a loud, angry voice, she said many loud, angry things, to the effect that she had never heard of anything so naughty in all her life, that her little boy was the worst little boy in the world, and that she would make him remember to have more sense the next time. When, frightened into hysteria, he began screaming and struggling, she raised her voice, and she showed him, with a finger trembling with emotion, the great gaping cuts he had made in the cloth; but as that was just what the little boy had meant to make, he had not the slightest idea of what was the matter. And as he continued to scream, and she to talk louder and louder, she undressed him so that his tender flesh would be quite unprotected from her rage. Then she beat him with her hands, with her strong, nervous, well-shaped, and carefully manicured hands.
That night, when the little boy’s father came home, he asked, “Where’s Buster?”
His mother said: “He’s in bed. I couldn’t let him stay up to dinner. He did the naughtiest thing today! I had to give him his first spanking. I hated to—and I didn’t after the very first do more than just the lightest taps. But you just have to once in a while. They have to be taught to use their sense.”
Her husband inquired, “What’d he do that was so fearfully bad?”
She felt the note of skepticism in his voice, and resented it. “You know the new curtains for the guestroom?”
He nodded. He had thought more than once about those curtains, and what they stood for. And when he heard what had happened, there was no note of skepticism in his voice as he said, “Oh, children are the limit!” And he asked, anxiously, “How much harm did he do? Will they have to be all done over?”
His wife said: “Well, I should think they would! He simply made mince-meat out of all they’ve done in the last two days—let alone all the cretonne spoiled!”
The little boy’s father frowned and began doing mental arithmetic. His wife knew by the expression of his face what he was doing, and it made her nervous. She was nervous enough already without that. In a moment she said, in a dry tone that fitted the words, “You’d better go up and look at it yourself, if you don’t think—”
Her husband answered, rather somberly, “Oh, I take your word for it.” Then he went on doing mental arithmetic, and showing it. For the moment they had both quite forgotten the little boy.
But later the little boy’s father asked, apropos of nothing, “Do you suppose the little tike knew he was doing something bad? He’s such a little shaver still.”
His wife said decidedly: “Oh, if you’d seen the guilty look he had the minute he saw me. He positively turned pale tobe caught at it. Of course he knew. A great big boy like that! Anybody’d have more sense than not to know.”
What happened to the little boy? I don’t think I’ll tell you in real language what happened to the little boy, because I don’t think either you or I could stand it. But I’ll set down some dry facts, which bear on the question, and comment on the situation in safely sterilized pseudo-scientific terms, guaranteed to be insulated from any personal emotion.
When the little boy was born, although he was as fine a baby as ever lived, he was by no means a perfect specimen of humanity. Like all of his kind, he was born blind and deaf, and had very little sense of taste and not much sense of touch. He put in the first year of his life acquiring all these senses, and he made a fine job of it, thanks to his excellent constitution and the care his mother took of him.
But even then he was by no means completed. He had, as you will remember, a finely delicate set of nerves; but, of course, they were not as yet adequately linked up, either with one another or with the world; and now he was busy every waking moment on this new job of adjusting and settling his nervous system, ready for the long lifetime of hard, accurate service expected from it. Everything was grist that came to that little mill; every sight, sound, sensation, impression—the little boy’s brain took them all in, and began arranging them for future reference. Little by little his nerves began to get hooked up in the right order, and because he was a very normal child, they began to give him accurate information about what was outside him in the world.
All this information was stored away by the little boy’s brain according to the law of association, that law which makes us hold a flower up to our nose, although we may never have seen that kind of flower before. It’s the law which, after one experience with fire, makes us take hold of the lower end of a burning candle, and not of the flame; it is the law by means of which we have from babyhood sorted out and set in order the vast numbers of sensations brought us by our nerves.
The little boy was in full swing of this process, and fairly breathless with his interest in it. Every single object in his world was becoming enriched with an ever-increasing cluster of associations. The cat was all thick with them, associations of softness, and purriness, and occasionally of scratchiness. When he looked at her now, all her qualities were present to his mind, and he no longer needed to feel of her to know that she was soft. He did not even need to see her. If he heard the word “cat,” the little boy’s nerves instantly presented him with a neat, well-ordered group of all the things he knew about a cat. And so it was with everything. Soap meant a white, wet smoothness and the “give” of it under a vigorous digging fingernail; and scissors meant—but we’d better not say anything about what scissors meant to the little boy.
In fact, I find that it is very hard to bring myself to put down, even in the driest words, what happened to the little boy at the moment when his investigation into the nature of things made him inconvenient to his mother’s plans for impressing Bella Parsons. I think I will not try to tell you at all.
It is safer not to attempt to tell you for fear of using too strong language. It’s best not to try to give you any idea of how the little boy screamed and screamed until he lost his mind as truly as any fear-crazed person in a burning theater, nor how all the delicately adjusted mechanism of his little body was knocked temporarily all crooked, as the mechanism of a grown man’s body is twisted by the emotion of being under fire on the battle field for the first time; nor how later, as he lay in his little bed, sobbing and crushed, his fear, his horror, his inability to understand, and his hatred, poured veritable poisons into his blood, as though his mother had given him a dose of strychnine.
No, although all those, and many more, are plain, well-established facts, we will not describe them, because there are plenty of unpleasant things in real life without reading about them in stories. And, anyhow, he was only a baby of three, who had destroyed what would cost at least eight sacred dollars to replace, and he had very properly been spanked for his mischief. It wasn’t a hard spanking either. We have his mother’s word for that.
Let us therefore look the other way from the bed where the little boy lies sleeping it off, with an occasional nervous tremor running over him; and let us observe the more cheerful phenomenon of his astonishing capacity for readjustment. For he was made of sturdy stuff, and he rose up the next morning, made over by his sleep, perhaps not quite so rosy as the day before, but quite as lively and alert as ever, and quite as hungry for his breakfast and for life. Externally, he looked exactly the same child, and if internally he had added to his old associations about cats, and stoves, and flowers, a whole new set of associations connected with his mother and a certain tone of voice and a certain look in her face, why, all this was quite invisible, did not induce a degree of fever which would have showed on the clinical thermometer; and so nobody was troubled about it.
“All this” became, however, troublesome, visible again, the day after Bella Parsons’ visit began. Like most visits of this sort, it brought with it a considerable amount of nervous tension for the household, and the little boy’s nerves recorded nervous tension as accurately as a wireless apparatus records vibrations. In addition, his nerves were quicker to feel nervous tension than ever before. He didn’t like the visiting lady either, because he soon learned that she thought little boys a great nuisance and always likely to be in some mischief. It was very trying for his young mother, so anxious to have everything “go exactly right” in the presence of her critical acquaintance, when her little son, on the second morning of the visit, refused to go and shake hands with Mrs. Parsons. Although he could not have told why, the little boy refused because he felt that Mrs. Parsons wanted to shake his hand as little as he wanted to shake hers. But he did not know that he felt this impolite analysis of the situation. He only shook his head and backed away.
His mother did not, as you might think she would have done, thereupon consider the question of exactly how valuable it was for a three-year-old boy to shake the hand of a lady who considered him a nuisance. No, she stiffened all over her nervous young body, because she knew her visitor was looking at her with malicious eyes, and she said in a stern voice, with a vibration of anger in it like the shimmer of heat over a red-hot bar, “Come right here this minute, and do what I say.” That was what had been said to her in her childhood, and the words flowed smoothly from her tongue.
Now, human bodies are so constituted that by far the most vivid impression the little boy got from this speech was from the heat of anger in the voice; and—again that is the way we are all put together—this came to him accompanied with a horrifyingly clear and burningly prompt association. That was the way his mother’s voice had sounded in the guestroom. This recollection instantly tied his nerves up tight in aching ganglia again, so that all the quick, pleasant give-and-take between them and his intelligence was gone. They no longer told him accurately what was happening in the world. They only burned, and twitched, and snapped with the recollection brought to them by that tone in his mother’s voice.
So it happened that he did not step forward and shake Mrs. Parsons’ hand. He was now only dimly aware that there was any Mrs. Parsons in the world. He stood perfectly still, his face very deeply flushed, his jaw set hard, his hands and feet as cold as ice, and a sick, dull look of anger in his eyes—his eyes which we have seen shining like stars. He was in the state of mind which, two centuries ago, was called madness or insanity, which doctors nowadays call hysteria, and which his mother called stubbornness.
But she did not call it stubbornness in herself as she stood there facing him, her own sensitive nerves jangling fiercely. No; although she was in precisely the same state of mind as her son, she called it firmness; nor did she perceive in it a considerable admixture of fear lest Bella Parsons report to her wealthy in-laws that her old friend “could not make her little boy mind.”
If at this critical moment she had taken her little boy by the hand, led him quietly upstairs, given him a warm bath, several degrees hotter than usual, and laid him gently down on a bed in a silent darkenedroom, with plenty of fresh air, those terribly tense nerve knots of his might have cracked, and his blood might again have circulated freely, so that his feet and hands would have lost their icy chill. Then, the next time the heat of anger shimmering ominously over her voice had brought back those brutal associations of violence and rage to pluck with tragic fingers at her little son’s nerves, if she had taken him out to his sand pile, and left him alone to watch the clean white sand slide between his fingers till his heart had gone back to its normal pulse; and so and so and so for several months and years, why, perhaps, she might have got her little boy back to the state he would have been in if, upon entering the guestroom, she had sat down by him and by intelligent, patient questioning had extracted from him and corrected his baby idea that if it was all right for strange women to sit cutting cloth into strips, it was all right for a little boy to do the same. Perhaps—let us hope so. Let us forget the hard law of nature, which never lets us undo anything.
However, she did none of these things. Poor young mother! But the point is to tell you what she did do. She said to herself: “I must be firm now. It’s now or never! It’s for his own good!” and then, with one eye on Bella Parsons’ wealthy in-laws, she put on his shoulder a nervously gripping hand which conveyed to his little mind ten thousand more quivering associations of violence and rage. And she pushed him forward, not very gently, and when he would not shake hands, being by this time practically blind with anger and fear and horror, she shook him; and finally she took him upstairs and—No, decidedly, I will not give you even an outline of what passed between this loving, well-educated American mother and her son. Besides, there was nothing unusual in it. Very likely her neighbor next door was doing the very same thing to her little son.
After a time, she came hastily out of the nursery,—the nursery she had spent so much loving care upon,—and locked the door behind her. Instantly there was a sound of furious kickings on the door, and beatings with small, clenched fists; and a strange, shrill, choked, suffocated voice, which had never been heard in that house before, began shrieking out: “I hate you! I hate you! I wish I could kill you!” Yes, it was very likely that the little boy next door was saying the same thing. Just the ordinary thing, you see, when little boys have to begin to learn to mind their mammas.
This mamma went downstairs to her visitor, rather flushed, but with a surface of calmness which reflected great credit on her powers of self-control. “You just have to be firm with them,” she informed the childless Mrs. Parsons, with an air of mature experience. “If they ever once get ahead of you, there’s no end to it.” Then they went upstairs to the guestroom, and said how pretty it was, and remarked how much more chic appliquéd cretonne was than chintz, and agreed that the roses in the wreaths were “just too lovely!”
The other day a nerve specialist, a rather sad, stern, disillusioned old man, was visiting my home, and he chanced to speak to me of the little boy. He said: “The child is eight years old now. His mother brought him to me the other day for treatment for some obscure nervous trouble that borders on St. Vitus’s dance. And he has some morbid desires, too, that are increasingly hard to control. And he has the nightmare nearly every night. His mother said she couldn’t understand what was the matter with him. All his ancestors had had such good constitutions. And she’d always taken such good care of him. She said she’s simply given up her life to do the right thing for the child. She said she thought it must be due to the exciting conditions of modern life that are so hard on children.”
“Could you do anything for him?” I asked.
“Not unless I could unlive his life for him, and get him a new mother to begin again with,” said the doctor, wearily.
“Well, don’t you think modern conditions are responsible for the prevalence of nervous disorders?” I asked. “Three generations ago he wouldn’t have had any more understanding upbringing.”
“No, but three generations ago his body wouldn’t have had any intelligent care either, and nature would have had a chance to kill him kindly with a germ. Did you ever walk through an old churchyard, and estimate the rate of child mortality? Typhoid, scarlet fever, diphtheria: they must have accounted for innumerable nervously under-par children. Nowadays we take such good care of the bodies that sick souls can’t escape.” (You must not take the nerve specialist too literally. He is very tired and old, and weary with watching human folly.)
Something about this talk had given me a new idea, and I went to the Wise Man with whom I talk everything over. I told him the story, and asked him what he thought of it. He said, very impolitely, “I think that that cruel and vulgar woman thought more of her curtains than of finding out what was in her little boy’s mind.” When the Wise Man is stirred, he often shows it by being cross. I looked to see if his eyes were sad. And they were! The Wise Man loves little children.
I said: “I don’t believe she was vulgar and cruel. I don’t believe she cared more for her curtains than for her little son. I think she hadn’t the slightest idea what she was doing. I think she was only a poor little girl herself, all confused with her silly desire to show off to a woman she didn’t esteem. I think she was a little girl who had had put on her a responsibility for which she wasn’t prepared. And she paid a tragic price for her mistake.”
The Wise Man’s eyes were sadder than ever when I finished. He nodded his head as if he saw what I meant. And after a moment of silence, he said: “You’d better write that into a story. It may be in time to save the little boy of some other little-girl mother!”—Dorothy Canfield, in Good Housekeeping for September.