The Idiot at Home Part 2

"That's exactly what I was going to say," said the Idiot. "Many a time when Mrs. Idiot has gone out shopping, as she did on the day in question, and I have remained at home for a rest, I have wished before evening came that I had gone shopping and let my wife have the rest. As a matter of fact, the bringing up of children should be left to the mother--"

"Oh, but the father should have something to do with it," interrupted Mrs. Idiot. "It is too great a responsibility to place on a woman's shoulders."

"You didn't let me finish, my dear," said the Idiot, amiably. "I was going to say that the mother should bring the children up, and the father should take 'em down when they get up too high."

"My views to a dot," said Mr. Pedagog, with more enthusiasm than he had ever yet shown over the Idiot's dicta. "Just as in ordinary colonial government, the home authorities should govern, and when necessary a stronger power should intervene."

"Ideal--is it not?" laughed Mrs. Idiot, addressing Mrs. Pedagog. "The mother, Spain. The children, Cuba. Papa, the great and glorious United States!"

"Ahem! Well," said Mr. Pedagog, "I didn't mean that exactly, you know--"

"But it's what you said, John," said Mrs. Pedagog, somewhat severely.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'LET THE FATHERS LOOK AFTER THE CHILDREN AT NIGHT'"]

"Well, I don't see why there can't be a division of responsibility,"

said the Poet, who had never married, and who knew children only as a theory. "Let the mothers look after them in the daytime, and the fathers at night."

This sally was greeted with an outburst of applause, it was so practical.

"Excuse me!" said the Idiot. "I'm not selfish, but I don't want to have charge of the children at night. Why, when Tommy was cutting his teeth I suffered agonies when night came on. I was down-town all day, and so wasn't very much bothered then, but at night it was something awful. Not only Tommy's tooth, but the fear that his mother would tread on a tack."

"That was unselfish," said Mr. Pedagog, dryly. "You weren't afraid of treading on one yourself."

"How could I?" said the Idiot. "I had all I could do trying to keep my wife from knowing that I was disturbed. It is bad enough to be worried over a crying babe, without being bothered by an irritated husband, so I simply lay there pretending to be asleep and snoring away for dear life."

"You are the most considerate man I ever heard of," said Mrs. Pedagog, smiling broadly.

"You don't mean to say," said the Poet, with a frown, "that you made your wife get up and take all the trouble and bother--"

"I'd only have been in the way," said the Idiot, meekly.

"So he kept quiet and pretended to snore like the good old Idiot that he is," put in the Doctor. "And he did the right thing, too," he added. "If all fathers would obliterate themselves on occasions of that sort, and let the mothers rule, the Tommys and d.i.c.kies and Harrys would go to sleep a great deal more quickly."

"We are rambling," said Mr. Pedagog. "The question of a father's duty towards a teething son has nothing to do with the question of a child's right to dine with his parents."

"Oh, I don't know," said the Idiot. "If we are to consider this matter scientifically we must start right. Teething is a natural first step, for if a child hath no teeth, wherewithal shall he eat dinners with his parents or without them?"

"That is all very well," retorted Mr. Pedagog, "but to discuss fire-engines intelligently it is not necessary to go back to the times of Elisha to begin it."

Mr. Whitechoker--now the Rev. Theophilus Whitechoker, D.D., for he, too, had prospered--smiled deprecatingly. There is no man in the world who more thoroughly appreciates a biblical joke than the prosperous clergyman.

"Well," said the Idiot, reflectively, "I quite agree with your proposition that children should dine in the dining-room with their parents and not up-stairs in the nursery, with a lot of tin soldiers and golliwogs. The manners of parents are no better than those of tin soldiers and golliwogs, but their conversation is apt to prove more instructive; and as for the stern father who says his children must dine in the kitchen until they learn better manners, I never had much confidence in him or in his manners, either."

"I don't see," said the genial old gentleman who occasionally imbibed, "how you can discipline children in the nursery. If they misbehave in the dining-room you can send them up-stairs to the nursery, but if they misbehave in the nursery, where the deuce can you send them?"

"To bed," said Mr. Brief.

"Never!" cried the Idiot. "Children, Mr. Brief, as I understand them--and I have known three very well; myself as a boy, and Tommy and Mollie--children, as I understand them, are never naughty for the mere fun of being so. Their wickedness grows out of their wonderful stores of unexpended and unexpendable energy. Take my son Thomas on last Sat.u.r.day afternoon, for instance. It was a rainy Sat.u.r.day, and Tommy, instead of being out-of-doors all morning and afternoon getting rid of his superfluous vitality, had been cooped up in the house all day doing nothing. Shortly before dinner we had a difference of opinion which lasted for more time than I like to think about. I was tired and irritable. Tommy wasn't tired, but he _was_ irritable, and, from his point of view, was as right as I was. He had the best of me to the extent that I was tired and he wasn't. I had the best of him to the extent that I had authority and he hadn't--"

"And who came out ahead?" asked Mr. Pedagog.

"I did," said the Idiot, "because I was bigger than he was; but what I was going to say was this: Mr. Brief would have sent him to bed, thereby adding to the boy's stock of energy, already too great for his little mind to control."

"And what did you do?" asked Mr. Brief.

"Nothin'," said a small but unmistakably masculine voice from behind the portieres.

"Thomas!" said the Idiot, severely, as all turned to see who had spoken.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "A LITTLE FIGURE CLAD IN WHITE"]

A little figure clad in white, ably supported by a still smaller figure, also clad in white, but with an additional ruffle about the neck, both of them barefooted, appeared in the doorway.

"Why, Mollie!" said Mrs. Idiot.

"We comed down to thee how you wath gettin' along," said the little girl.

"Yes, we did," said the boy. "But he didn't do a thing to me that day,"

he added, climbing on his father's knee and snuggling down against his vest-pocket with a sweet little sigh of satisfaction. "Did you, pa?"

"Yes, Thomas," said the Idiot. "Don't you remember that I ignored you utterly?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'I'D RATHER BE SPANKED THAN NOT NOTICED AT ALL'"]

"Yes, I do," said Tommy. "But I'd rather be spanked than not noticed at all."

"I am afraid," said Mr. Pedagog a few hours later, as he and Mrs.

Pedagog were returning home, "I am very much afraid that the Idiot's children are being spoiled."

"I hope they are!" returned the good lady, "for really, John, I never knew a boy or a girl to grow into man or womanhood and amount to anything who hadn't been spoiled in childhood. Spoiling is another name for the att.i.tude of parents who make comrades of their children and who do not set themselves up as tyrants--"

"But the veneration of a child for his father and mother--" Mr. Pedagog began.

"Should not degenerate into the awe which one feels for an unrelenting despot!" interrupted Mrs. Pedagog.

The old gentleman discreetly retired from the field.

As for Mrs. and Mr. Idiot, they retired that night satisfied with the evening's diversion, and just before he turned out the light the Idiot walked into the nursery to say good-night to the children.

"You're a good old pop!" said Tommy, with an affectionate hug. "_The best I ever had!_"

As for Mollie, she was sleeping soundly, with a smile on her placid little face which showed that, "spoiled" as she was, she was happy; and what should the Idiot or any one else seek to bring into a child's life but happiness?

III