ears and years ago, when I was about eight years old, I came into the dining-room on a wet November morning and found that my mother was not at the breakfast-table. Mrs. Schaeffer, the neighborhood nurse, was there instead. She was a very brisk person, as I remember, and she answered the quick fall of my heart before my lips framed the question.
"I have a present for you, my dear. The doctor brought it in the night. Your mother is staying in bed to take care of it. Look!"
There was a chair drawn close to the base-burner. In the chair was a clothes-basket. Mrs. Schaeffer stooped over the basket and pulled down a bit of blanket. A baby! A tiny red-faced baby!
Underneath a bashful, tomboyish exterior I was an extremely emotional child. I had lived much in my eight years in the way of tensity of feeling. Yet after all these years I still recall that the profound emotion that shook me then dwarfed all the sensations that I had experienced before.
It was not at all the feeling that all little girls have on seeing a new baby. It was not the feeling that I myself had had and still do have when some fortunate woman allows me to hold one of those heavenly little bundles. This was different.
In the first place, I held in complete scorn the drool about the present and the doctor. I was eight years old and I had been in public school for a year. I knew where babies hailed from. I knew their cost. Nobody knew that I knew; that is, none but my playmates. My mother had told me to come to her when I was twelve and she would tell me the true story of the stork. I fully intended to come to her then. But, in the meantime, knowing that the baby was coming and full of erroneous information, I had suffered torments of apprehension.
I adored my mother. She was a brilliant and beautiful woman whose affection for her children reached heights of passionate devotion possible only to the highly mental type. My brother, my sister, and I were bound to her by ties so vital that any thought of her suffering was misery to us. I had been very sure that she would die. And now it was all over; she was doing well, and this was her baby. Our baby. Life, so strange and in many ways so frightening, once more had twisted me with fear and vicarious pain and then, as often before, had relented and left me with something beautiful. I felt this clearly. The baby was to me what the rainbow must have been to the lonely and bewildered voyagers stranded on Mount Ararat.
She was more than that. She was the mystery and beauty of life.
I knew much more about grown-up troubles than my elders dreamed I did. I worried over family matters that they did not dream I knew. I was finding life full of incomprehensible responsibilities. I wanted to help so much and didn't know how to make them understand that I was quite capable of understanding. And in the midst of all the uneasiness and bewilderment this beautiful thing had happened. How marvelous! How unbelievably good! What happiness!
My big brother and my younger sister stood beside the basket with me.
"She shall be my baby!" announced my brother. "Let me hold her."
I looked at Mrs. Schaeffer in an agony of apprehension. She smiled and lifted the orris-scented bundle.
"A man can't have a baby," she said with finality. "This shall be sister's baby." She laid the bundle in my arms.
And she was my baby. Mother was an invalid for several years. There was no money for a nurse. She was my little child. She was with me every moment when I was not at school. I bathed her, fed her, tended her, and loved her for three years.
Three years! What a tiny lifetime! Too short to have meant much of itself, but what a long, long life in the profundity of its influence on me!
She died of diphtheria after an illness of a single day.
We had thought it only a heavy cold, and we children had not been isolated. I was standing beside her when the doctor shook his head at my mother and laid down the feeble little hand. It was January. I went out into the back yard and knelt in the snow by the woodpile.
"Listen, God," I said threateningly, "I'm going to pray to you to save her. If you don't save her, I'll never pray to you again. I'll not even believe you are God."
I did pray, and He did not heed, and I returned from her funeral a complete little atheist and with a more or less serious attack of diphtheria.
Some fool—many fools, have said with a sigh and a smile that it's a blessing children forget their griefs. Listen! A child over ten forgets nothing in the way of actual grief. The wound heals, of course, but the memory scar is permanent.