Ralph Bergengren

“ Whatever else a man does, whether he lives by banking or burglary, ascends to the presidency or descends to the gutter, he is likely to be a father: they are as countless as the pebbles on a beach or the leaves in Vallombrosa, and the few who evade paternity evade also the purpose for which nature evidently created them, and go through life thumbing their noses, so to speak, at Divine Providence. ”

“ Todd disapproves of him, though he has known Miss Lemon from her perambulator, all is over. A pale ghost, he may, in either case, sometimes hang his spectral hat in the Todd hallway, and even extend his phantom legs under the Todd mahogany; but ALL IS OVER. Divinely harmonious as they seem, these two will never agree to let him try, however humbly and conscientiously, to cultivate the inexpensive pleasure of being happy in their happiness. He becomes what no self-respecting man can wish to be—a fly in the ointment. ”

“ I am no such stickler for exactitude that I would take away from any man whatever pleasure he may derive from thinking that he was once a barefoot boy, even if circumstances were against him and his mother as adamant in her refusal to let him go barefooted. But the fallacy is indestructible: the symbols may not have been universal, but it is true enough of boyhood that time then seems to be without limit; and this comfortable, unthinking sense of immortality is what men have lost and would fain recover. ”

“ Baby himself may just have been born again. That innocent-seeming and rather silly-sounding monologue, which we flatter ourselves is an earnest attempt to imitate our own speech,—“Nja njan dada atta mama papaï attaï na-na-na hatta meenĕ-meenĕ-meeneĕ mŏmm mŏmma ao-u,”—may it not be the soliloquy of a gentle philosopher, or, again, the confession of an out-and-out rascal, talking to himself of his misdeeds, chuckling and cooing over them, indeed, before he forgets them in this new state of being? ”

“ But even if man, like the fly, inherits his individual length of life, he will, again like the fly, go on living it with little concern as to whatever invisible string may be fastened to his inheritance. He will think hopefully that any ancestor he has had who died by violence or a germ might otherwise have lived to be as hale and hearty as Father William, that lively sage whose habit was to stand on his head at intervals, and to enter a door by turning a back-somersault. ”

“ One forgets how feverishly the seconds chased each other, faster than human feet could follow, when one’s little self was late for school, and the clamor of the distant bell ended in a solemn, ominous silence. Then was the opportunity for stout heart to play “hookey,” and to lure the finny tribe with a poor worm impaled on a bent pin; and that, in the opinion of all the editors of all the newspapers in the United States, is what all of us always did. ”

“ I am not forgetting—for I do them an honor I can hardly express—those fathers who walk, all through the night, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, across an otherwise silent room, that the motion incidental to their perambulation may soothe a mysteriously afflicted babe to sleep; nor am I unaware that Father sometimes pushes baby’s wicker chariot, pausing ever and anon to pick up and restore some article of infant use or pleasure that the little rascal has mischievously thrown overboard, and in many other touching ways patiently tries to make himself useful. ”

“ TO any sensitive man, not yet armored by the indifference that comes of being married himself, there is cause for apprehension in the prospect of meeting for the first time that person, male or female, whom somebody he knows and loves has recently agreed to marry. The event, when it comes, is unavoidable, nor is there any period in adult life when it may not happen, or anybody we know so old that he or she may not occasion it. Fact is more romantic, or at any rate remains romantic much later in life, than fiction. ”

“ But my soul, I like to think, which is the Me for work and play, love, friendship, and all the finer things of life, already will have closed the door of its house and gone away. And as it goes, I like to think, also, that it whistles cheerfully a little tune of its own, the burden of which is “Life is long.” ”

“ I know a landlord who speaks with pleasure of the social aspect of collecting his rents; but his is a selected tenantry, for he lets apartments only to what he calls “nice people,” whose society he feels reasonably certain he will enjoy on rent-day, and whose financial status, he also feels reasonably certain, is and will remain such that no painful embarrassment on this sordid but necessary side of their relations will ever cast a gloom over his visit. ”

“ At that period, indeed, it is hardly to be expected that any father should feel immediately en rapport with his new-born child, or become intimately associated with its helpless, flower-like life. Ever since the idea, which has now so long lost its original element of bewildering surprise, yet remains always somewhat surprising, first dawned upon a human father and mother that this baby belonged to them, conditions have inexorably consigned the infant to the care of its mother, while its father pursued elsewhere the equally necessary business of providing sustenance for the family. ”

“ Miss Lemon to Mr. Todd. Well and good. Nature, which, for some reason that mankind has long curiously and vainly sought to penetrate, wishes to continue the human race, is, one may believe, reasonably well satisfied. It is one job among many. But the satisfaction of Mr. Todd and Miss Lemon, if it could be put to such haberdashery use, would girdle the Equator, and the ends, tied in a true lover’s knot, would flutter beyond the farthest visible star. Men and women have become engaged in the past; men and women will become engaged in the future ”

“ Century by century, generation by generation, we have acquired tastes and conventions that prevent us from returning to the simple, happy, uncomplicated life of our ape-like ancestors. And in this civilization that we have made, the figure of the landlord bulks large and overshadowing, and might, indeed, be likened to Rodin’s Thinker, thinking, in this instance, about how much more he shall raise the rent. ”

“ Why, I myself, meeting a baby in a perambulator, have made such antic faces that I might fairly have been called Jacke, or John the Foole, by anybody who saw me, and all to cheere up the younge man and make him merry. A little older yet, the child will run and play, rolling his hoop, spinning his top, enjoying the excitement of tag and hide-and-go-seek ”

“ One sees in imagination the profiteering landlord, after looking long and intently at a bright object, say a five-dollar gold-piece, dropping peacefully asleep; one hears the voice of the scientist repeating, firmly and monotonously, “When you wake up you will never want anything more than a just rent—a just rent—a just rent—a just rent.” ”

“ So taken for granted is this vocation of fatherhood, and so little considered in comparison with other masculine employments, that no correspondence school offers a course, and many a young man undertakes to raise children with less hesitation than he would start in to raise chickens. Some accept fatherhood with joy, others with resignation, like a recently wedded young Italian who cobbles my shoes, and spoke the other day of his own new little one. ”

“ And there is another reason even more valuable than a pendent ancestor. You and I, gentle Reader, have souls (though there may be times of discouragement when we wish we hadn’t) , and old age is a mere trivial incident in our jolly eternal lives. Willy-nilly, we begin growing older, by the conventional measurement of time, with our first breath; but who can prove that we are not in reality very much older than we look in the beginning, and very much younger than we look in the end? ”

“ The assumption that this is an effort to speak the language of the baby’s elders is academic, as, for that matter, is the assumption that they are his elders. There may even be no baby at all; for, as Schopenhauer has almost brusquely put it, “The uneasiness that keeps the never-resting clock of metaphysics in motion, is the consciousness that the non-existence of this world is just as possible as its existence.” ”

“ Why, sir, what does a baby know about morning?”
So with Pantaloon: we comparative youngsters have only an external and objective idea of him—his slippers, his stockings, his peevish and morose humors, his feeble mirth and empty garrulity. What living is really like to him we cannot know until we are pantaloons ourselves, and then, mayhap, we shall have forgotten what living is like to us now; let it suffice that we shall probably be far less bothered by our shrunk shanks and piping voices than we now believe possible. At the same time, it will do no harm for some of us to “watch our step.” ”

“ I do not know, though I very much doubt, that one old fly is ever more peevish and morose than another old fly; but with mankind, whose superior intelligence so often makes trouble for his associates, the variations are visible. Savages, unhampered by the conventions of an artificial civilization, have efficiently knocked their elders on the head in consequence. ”

“ Their practice shocks and disconcerts the observer. The behavior of Sir Isaac Newton, when kicked in the stomach, was perfectly scandalous.
And what is there, after all, in the life of a boy, that a man would find interesting? Or that he may not do, if such is sufficiently his desire to “make” the time for it, as he makes time for his adult pleasures, and if he is not too old or too fat? He can spend his vacation at the old swimming-hole—but he never does it. He can go barefooted whenever he wishes: his mother can no longer prevent him. ”

“ In this sense, Charlie Wah Loo, with his washtub and irons, is his own beloved helpmate.
Briefly, I am a landlord. But do not hate me, gentle reader, for I am of that mild, reticent, and reluctant kind to whom even collecting the rent, to say nothing of raising it, is more a pain than a pleasure. There are such landlords, products of evolution, inheritance, and a civilization necessarily based on barter. Our anxious desire is to exact no more than a “fair rent” ”

“ Or, again, to the man who believes that death snuffs him out like a candle, this skeleton at the feast might easily become an urgent reminder that he is still living, and he would most unwisely stuff himself out like a toy balloon while he still had a chance. But your olde, olde, very olde man is a reality: he is both dead and alive ”

“ Human nature takes neither the skeleton nor the mummy with continuous seriousness, and proves by its attitude that, if we instinctively fear death at one moment, we instinctively ridicule our fear at another. ”

“ Todd and Miss Lemon become one, yet realize that in many respects, being human, they must still remain two; then, indeed, the congratulator may actually be enriched by the acquisition of a new friend—but not instantly, as one is enriched by the acquisition of a new hat. Yet it is always the wiser part, in preparing to meet a beloved, to prepare for the worst. ”

“ Let it not be imagined that I lack respect for age. I tell you frankly, ageing and respected Reader, that so long as you can intelligently read even this essay, you are not seriously old; and when you cannot, you won’t know the difference, and no respect of mine will be of any value to you. Your time has not come to sit propped up at table as the latest modern improvement on the skeleton at the feast ”

“ Yet in due time the olde, olde, very olde man became such a motive, and to-day man is the only animal that takes care of its grandfather. When you think of the differences between men to-day and men then, between men then and the ape-men before them, and between men now as they go about their various occupations, it seems quite possible that ape-men had no souls at all, and that some men to-day have rudimentary ones, millions of years behind others in evolution. ”

“ Scientists themselves have decided that when babies, in that remote past when they first began really to interest their parents, and the human mother, the most pathetic figure of that primitive world, first began the personal and affectionate observation that was to develop slowly, over millions of years, until it found expression in the first Baby Book—scientists, themselves, I say, have decided that, then and there, you and I, intelligent reader, began to differ essentially from every other known kind of mammal. ”

“ The very youngest and the very oldest men in the world seem equally equipped for living in it—“sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”; and Baby, a little older, when he goes out in his perambulator is much like ancient Thomas Parr being conveyed to London as a human curiosity in a “litter and two horses (for the more easy carriage of a man so enfeebled and worn with age) .... ”

“ Heredity is still a mystery; the ancestry of free men is much more complicated than that of flies in bottles; and any of us, if he anxiously carried his genealogical research far enough back, would find a goodly number of forbears, prematurely carried off, from whom he might reasonably have inherited quite a lot of what the scientific mind calls the “hypothetical substance or substances which normally prevent old age and natural death.” Flies growing gracefully old in glass bottles therefore need not worry us, and every ancestor who has been hanged is a reason for optimism. ”