The baby stayed awake obstinately, but I was reconciled to the fact, for our discussion might have become hot, and the writing ended for that evening quite as effectually as the baby had done it.
Night came again, and this time John opened the subject, by placing before me a large package of foolscap, and a new gold pen.
'I have brought some paper for you to spoil, Helen,' he said, 'for I foresaw how it would end. Do your best, and I will do mine in the matter of beginnings. I cannot write easily, you know, but I can suggest and dictate, when you wish it; and you have been my amanuensis for a year and more, so it will all seem very natural.'
He looked down, as he spoke, at the scarred right hand and its missing fingers, carried away eighteen months before by a rebel bullet, and a little shade passed over his face.
'No, John,' I said, 'don't look there now; look at my two hands waiting to do the work of that, and tell me if two are not better than one. We will write an article which shall astonish the critics, and bring letters from all the magazines, begging us to become special contributors at once; and we will not quarrel as to who shall have the glory, but make it a joint matter. And now I am ready to begin, and propose to speak upon a subject which I wonder greatly no one has taken up in detail before. Your words last evening brought out some dormant ideas. 'We do our share in aggravating the people we meet daily,' you said, and I have been reflecting upon the matter ever since, till now I am prepared to give my opinions to the world.'
So saying, I arranged the table properly, took out some sheets of the smooth, white paper, filled my pen, and waited for the dawning of an idea. To which it came first, I shall not tell you. The results are before you: which part is John's, which mine, you will never learn from us. It will be of no avail for you to write to the editors, for they don't know either, and will not be told. It will be a useful exercise for you to dissect the article, and set apart the masculine from the feminine portions. The critics will for once be quite at a loss how to abuse it, probably. I foresee a general distraction in the minds of our readers, and already hear ourselves classed as among one of the trials which I select as the title of 'Our Article.'
SOME OF THE AGGRAVATIONS OF LIVING
Two thirds of life in the aggregate are made up of aggravations. They begin with our beginning, and only cease with our ending; perhaps, if good Calvinists speak the truth, not even then, for, according to their belief, the souls in torment look always upon the blessed in heaven, and this surely is the most horrible species of aggravation ever devised by man or fiend.
From the time when the air first fills the lungs and the infant screams at the new sensation, to the day when fingers press down the resisting lids and straighten the stiffening limbs, we are forced to meet and to bear all manner of aggravations in nine tenths of our daily life.
Has it ever occurred to any of you what an amount of unnecessary suffering an infant endures, and have you ever watched the operations it undergoes daily, with reference to the confirming of this fact? If not, an inexhaustible field of inquiry lies open before you, and after a week's observation of bandages rolled till the flesh actually squeaksof pins stuck in and left, where you know they will prickof smotherings in blankets and garrotings with bibsof trottings for the wind and poundings for the stomach acheof wakings up to show to visitors, and puttings to sleep when sleep is at the other end of the land of Nod, and will not be induced to come under any circumstancesof rockings and tossingsof boiling catnip tea and smooth horrible castor oil poured down the unsuspecting throatafter a week of such observations, I say, you will decide with me that the baby's life is only a series of aggravations, and feel astonished the bills of infant mortality do not double and treble.
As years round out the little life, the hands, reaching out to the tree of knowledge, find themselves pushed back on all sides. The dearest wishes are made light of, the most earnest desires slighted, the most sacred thoughts ridiculed, till one marvels that men can grow up anything but devils. In the path where Gail Hamilton's feet have trod I need not follow, for she has told us what these 'Happiest Days' are, in better words than my pen can find. It warmed my heart as I read her protest against the platitudes concerning childhood and its various imagined delights. Mentally I shook hands, for she expressed my ideas so fully, that the notes I had long ago jotted down upon the subject I committed at once to the flames, satisfied I never could do any better, and might possibly do very much worse.
I believe that the major part of sour-tempered, perversely wrong-headed, and unhappily disposed people, of hot-headed fanatics, victims to one idea, of once noble souls who sink themselves in sensuality, and so go down to death, and of all the sad cases one hears and reads of day after day and year after year, are made so through unceasing aggravation at the most impressible time of life. Do any of you who may be my readers know of half a dozen happy families in your circle of friends and acquaintance? Do you know of half a dozen where boys prefer home and their sisters to the streets, or where girls do not court the most uninviting boy in preference to their own brothers?
One would almost imagine spite had been the feeling implanted in all homes, as they look at the private pinch exchanged between John and James, the face made by Mary at which Martha cries and is slapped by way of adjusting matters, and the general refusal of requests made to father and mother, whether reasonable or not. My own childhood was moderately happy, and yet I recall now the sense of burning indignation I sometimes suffered at wrongs done me, which the child's sense of justice told me were wrongs, and which I now know to have been so. Children are themselves one of the aggravations of living, but it is because we do not know how to treat them. I look for a time when every father shall be just, every mother reasonable as well as loving; when children shall neither be flogged up the way of life as in times past, or coaxed up with sugarplums as in times present, but, seeing with clear eyes the straight path, shall walk in it with joy, and finish their course with rejoicing.
Another aggravation, and not a minor one either it strikes me, is the summary way in which youth is put down by middle-aged and aged people. Youthful emotions are 'bosh and twaddle,' youthful ideas, 'crude, sir, very crude!' and youthful attempts to be and to do something in the world frowned at, as if action of any sort, save inaction, before forty, were an outrage on humanity, and an insult to the Creator.
How fares it with young professional men during the first ten years of their career? They hope and wait, doubt and wait, curse and wait, labor to wait, and in the mean time a wheezing old lawyer, with no more enthusiasm than a brickbat, takes the cases which Justice, if she were not blind, would have sent to his starving younger brethren, and pockets fat fees, a tenth of which would have lifted loads from many a heavy heart. An old family physician, an old minister, an old lawyer, are excellent in their way, and have a variety of pleasant associations with them, which it is impossible to pass over to the young aspirant who steps in to take their place; yet because Dr. Jones, aged sixty-eight, carried us safely through the measles, does it follow that Dr. Smith, aged twenty-eight, cannot do the same for our children?
Because for thirty years the Rev. Dr. Holdfast has preached upon election, and justification by faith, is the Rev. Dr. Holeman to be set down as presumptuously progressive, because he suggests works as a test of the faith we profess, and ventures to speak of God, not as the stern Deity who commands us all to be afraid of Him, and who drops lost souls into the pit with a calm satisfaction, but as the loving Father of the world, who wills that all men should come to the knowledge of His truth.