第44章

The Child selected a frying-pan.How it got the frying-pan remains to this day a mystery.The cook said "frying-pans don't walk upstairs." The nurse said she should be sorry to call anyone a liar, but that there was commonsense in everything.The scullery-maid said that if everybody did their own work other people would not be driven beyond the limits of human endurance; and the housekeeper said that she was sick and tired of life.My friend said it did not matter.

The Child clung to the frying-pan with passion.The book my friend was reading said that was how the human mind was formed: the Child's instinct prompted it to seize upon objects tending to develop its brain faculty.What the parent had got to do was to stand aside and watch events.

The Child proceeded to black everything about the nursery with the bottom of the frying-pan.It then set to work to lick the frying-pan clean.The nurse, a woman of narrow ideas, had a presentiment that later on it would be ill.My friend explained to her the error the world had hitherto committed: it had imagined that the parent knew a thing or two that the Child didn't.In future the Children were to do their bringing up themselves.In the house of the future the parents would be allotted the attics where they would be out of the way.They might occasionally be allowed down to dinner, say, on Sundays.

The Child, having exhausted all the nourishment the frying-pan contained, sought to develop its brain faculty by thumping itself over the head with the flat of the thing.With the selfishness of the average parent--thinking chiefly of what the Coroner might say, and indifferent to the future of humanity, my friend insisted upon changing the game.

[His foolish talk.]

The parent does not even know how to talk to his own Child.The Child is yearning to acquire a correct and dignified mode of expression.The parent says: "Did ums.Did naughty table hurt ickle tootsie pootsies? Baby say: ''Oo naughty table.Me no love 'oo.'"The Child despairs of ever learning English.What should we think ourselves were we to join a French class, and were the Instructor to commence talking to us French of this description? What the Child, according to the gentleman from Cambridge, says to itself is, "Oh for one hour's intelligent conversation with a human being who can talk the language."Will not the young gentleman from Cambridge descend to detail? Will he not give us a specimen dialogue?

A celebrated lady writer, who has made herself the mouthpiece of feminine indignation against male stupidity, took up the cudgels a little while ago on behalf of Mrs.Caudle.She admitted Mrs.Caudle appeared to be a somewhat foolish lady."BUT WHAT HAD CAUDLE EVERDONE TO IMPROVE MRS.CAUDLE'S MIND?" Had he ever sought, with intelligent illuminating conversation, to direct her thoughts towards other topics than lent umbrellas and red-headed minxes?

It is my complaint against so many of our teachers.They scold us for what we do, but so rarely tell us what we ought to do.Tell me how to talk to my baby, and I am willing to try.It is not as if Itook a personal pride in the phrase: "Did ums." I did not even invent it.I found it, so to speak, when I got here, and my experience is that it soothes the Child.When he is howling, and Isay "Did ums" with sympathetic intonation, he stops crying.Possibly enough it is astonishment at the ineptitude of the remark that silences him.Maybe it is that minor troubles are lost sight of face to face with the reflection that this is the sort of father with which fate has provided him.But may not even this be useful to him?

He has got to meet with stupid people in the world.Let him begin by contemplating me.It will make things easier for him later on.Iput forward the idea in the hope of comforting the young gentleman from Cambridge.