Part 21

“You’d put the children on pulleys and stretch ‘em out, I suppose!” gibed Grandma Sharpless.

“That might work, too,” replied the doctor, unruffled. “The Procrustean system isn’t so bad, if old Procrustes had only sent his victims to the gymnasium instead of putting them to bed. Yes, a quarter of an hour with the weight-pulleys every day would help undersized kiddies a good deal. But principally I should want the school-inspectors to keep the youngsters playing.”

“You don’t have to teach a child to play,” sniffed Grandma Sharpless, with womanly scorn of mere man’s views concerning children.

“Pardon me, Mrs. Sharpless, you taught your children to play.”

“I! Whatever makes you think that?”

“The simple fact that they didn’t die in babyhood.”

Mrs. Sharpless looked at him with a severity not unmingled with suspicion. “Sometimes, young man,” she observed, “you talk like a—a—a gump!”

“Take that, Strong!” said Mr. Clyde, joining in the doctor’s laugh against himself.

“Facts may sometimes sound foolish,” admitted Dr. Strong. “If they do, that’s the fault of the speaker. And it is a fact that every mother teaches her baby to play. Watch the cat if you don’t believe me. The wisest woman in America points out in her recent book that it is the mother’s playing with her baby which rouses in it the will to live. Without that will to live none of us would survive.”

“I don’t know who your wisest woman in America may be, but I don’t believe she knows what she is talking about,” declared Grandma Sharpless flatly.

“I’ve never known her when she didn’t,” retorted the doctor. “If Jane Addams of Hull House isn’t an expert in life, mental, moral, and physical, then there’s no such person! Why, see here, Mrs. Sharpless; do you know why a baby’s chance of survival is less in the very best possible institution without its mother, than in the very worst imaginable tenement with its mother, even though the mother is unable to nurse it?”

“It isn’t as well tended, I expect.”

“All its physical surroundings are a thousand times more advantageous: better air, better food, better temperature, better safeguarding against disease; yet babies in these surroundings just pine away and die. It’s almost impossible to bring up an infant on an institutional system. The infant death-rate of these well-meaning places is so appalling that nobody dares tell it publicly. And it is so, simply because there is no one to play with the babies. The nurses haven’t the time, though they have the instinct. I tell you, the most wonderful, mystic, profound thing in all the world, to me, is the sight of a young girl’s intuitive yearning to dandle every baby she may see. That’s the universal world-old, world-wide, deep-rooted genius of motherhood, which antedates the humankind, stirring within her and impelling her to help keep the race alive—by playing with the baby.”

“H’m! I hadn’t thought of it in that way,” confessed Grandma Sharpless. “There may be something in what you say, young man. But by the time children reach school age I guess they’ve learned that lesson.”

“Not always. At least, not properly, always. Let’s consult the Committee on School of our household organization.”

He sent for eight-year-old Julia.

“Question to lay before you, Miss Chairwoman,” said Dr. Strong. “How many of the girls in your grade hang around the hall or doorways during recess?”

“Oh, lots!” said Julia promptly.

“Are they the bigger girls? or the smaller ones?” The Committee on School considered the matter gravely. “Mary Hinks, she’s tall, but she’s awful thin and sickly,” she pronounced. “Dot Griswold and Cora Smith and Tiny Warley—why, I guess they’re most all the littlest girls in the class.”

Dr. Strong nodded. “Sure to be the undernourished, anaemic, lethargic ones,” said he. “They’re forgetting the lessons of their babyhood. Insensibly they are losing the will to live. But there’s nobody to tell them so. A thorough medical inspection service would correct that. It would include school-nurses who would go to the homes of the children and tell the parents what was the matter. Such a system might not be warranted to keep epidemics out of our schools, but it would stretch out and fill out those meager youngsters’ brains as well as bodies, and fit them to combat illness if it did come. The whole theory of the school’s attitude toward the child seems to me misconceived by those who have charge of the system. It assumes too much in authority and avoids too much in responsibility.

“Take the case of John Smith, who has two children to bring up under our enlightened system of government. Government says to John Smith, ‘Send your children to school!’ ‘Suppose I don’t wish to?’ says John Smith. ‘You’ve got to,’ says Government. ‘It isn’t safe for me to have them left uneducated.’ ‘Will you take care of them while they’re at school?’ says John Smith. ‘I’ll train their minds,’ says Government. ‘What about their bodies?’ says John Smith. ‘Hm!’ says Government; ‘that’s a horse of another color.’ ‘Then I’ll come with them and see that they’re looked after physically,’ says John Smith. ‘You will not!’ says Government. ‘I’m in loco ‘parentis, while they’re in school.’ ‘Then you take the entire loco of the parentis,’ says John Smith. ‘If you take my children away on the ground that you’re better fitted to care for their minds than I am, you ought to be at least as ready to look after their health. Otherwise,’ says John Smith, ‘go and teach yourself to stand on your head. You can’t teach my children.’ Now,” concluded Dr. Strong, “do you see any flaws in the Smith point of view?”

“Just plain common sense,” approved Grandma Sharpless.

“Clyde,” said Dr. Strong, with a twinkle, “if you don’t stop rubbing a hole in your chin, I’ll have to repair you. What’s preying on your mind?”

“I am trying,” replied Mr. Clyde deliberately, “to figure out, with reference to the School Superintendent and myself, just how a man who has made a fool of himself can write a letter to another man who has helped the first man make a fool of himself, admitting that he’s made a fool of himself, and yet avoid embarrassment, either to the man who has made a fool of himself or to the other man who aided the man in making a fool of himself. Do you get that?”

Dr. Strong rose. “I’m a Chinese doctor,” he observed, “not a Chinese puzzle-solver. That’s a matter between you and your ink-well. Meantime, having attained the point for which I’ve been climbing, I now declare this session adjourned.”

IV. THE CORNER DRUG-STORE

“No, it won’t add to the attractiveness of the neighborhood, perhaps,” said Mrs. Clyde thoughtfully. “But how convenient it will be!”

Mr. Clyde had come home with the news that a drug-store was to be opened shortly on the adjacent corner. Shifting his position to dodge a foliage-piercing shaft of sunlight—they were all sitting out on the shady lawn, in the cool of a September afternoon—Dr. Strong shook his head.