II
When Mother was scrubbing a floor was always a good time for Stephen. She forgot all about you for a while. Oh, what a weight fell off from your shoulders when Mother forgot about you for a while! How perfectly lovely it was just to walk around in the bedroom and know she wouldn’t come to the door any minute and look at you hard and say, “What are you doing, Stephen?” and add, “How did you get your rompers so dirty?”
Stephen stepped about and about in the room, silently, drawing long breaths. The bed, the floor, the bureau, everything looked different to you in the times when Mother forgot about you for a minute. It occurred to Stephen that maybe it was a rest to them, too, to have Mother forget about them and stop dusting and polishing and pushing them around. They looked sort of peaceful, the way he felt. He nodded his head to the bed and looked with sympathy at the bureau.
The lower drawer was a little open. There was something white showing. … Mother didn’t allow you to open her bureau drawers, but that looked like … it was! He pulled the drawer open and snatched out his Teddy-bear … his dear, dear Teddy-bear. So that was where she had hidden it!
He sat down on the floor, holding the bear tightly in his arms, wave after wave of relief washing over him in a warm relaxing flood. All his life long, ever since he could remember, more than three years now, he had gone to sleep with his big Teddy in his arms. The sight of the faithful pointed face, like no other face, the friendly staring black eyes, the familiar feel of the dear, woolly body close to him—they were saturated with a thousand memories of peace, with a thousand associations of drowsy comfort and escape from trouble. Days when he had been punished and then shut, screaming furiously, into the bedroom to “cry it out,” he had gone about blindly, feeling for Teddy through his tears, and, exhausted by his shrieking and kicking and anger, had often fallen asleep on the floor, Teddy in his arms, exercising that mystic power of consolation. The groove in Stephen’s brain was worn deep and true; Teddy meant quiet and rest and safety … and Stephen needed all he could get of those elements in his stormy little life, made up, so much of it, of fierce struggles against forces stronger than he.
The little boy sat on the floor of the quiet room, surrounded by the quiet furniture, resting itself visibly, and hugged his recovered treasure tightly to him, his round cheek pressed hard against the dingy white wool of the stuffed muzzle. He loved Teddy! He loved his Teddy! He was lost in unfathomable peace to have found him again. All the associations of tranquillity, the only tranquillity in Stephen’s life, which had accumulated about Teddy, rose in impalpable clouds about the child. What the smell of incense and the murmur of prayers are to the believer, what the first whiffs of his pipe to the dog-tired woodsman, what a green-shaded lamp over a quiet study table to the scholar, all that and more was Teddy to Stephen. His energetic, pugnacious little face grew dreamy, his eyes wide and gentle. For a moment not only had Mother forgotten about him, but he had forgotten about Mother.
Was it only four days ago that this new bitter phase of Stephen’s struggle for existence had come up? Mother had taken him to call on a lady. They had walked and walked and walked, Stephen’s short legs twinkling fast beside Mother’s long, strong stride, his arm almost pulled out of the socket by the firm grasp on his mittened hand by which she drew him along at her pace. He had been breathless when they arrived, and filled with that ruffled, irritable, nervous fatigue which walking with Mother always gave him. Then, after long and intolerably dull conversation, during which Stephen had been obliged to “sit still and don’t touch things,” the lady had showed them that hideous, pitiable, tragic wreck, which she had said was a washed Teddy-bear. “It suddenly occurred to me, Mrs. Knapp, that the amount of dirt and microbes that creature had been accumulating for two years must be beyond words. Molly drags it around on the floor, as like as not. …”
“Yes, just like Stephen with his Teddy,” Stephen’s mother said.
“And once I thought of it, it made me shudder. So I just put it in the tub and washed it. You see it came out all right.”
She held up the dreadful remains, by one limp, lumpy arm, and both the mothers looked at it with interest and approval. Stephen’s horror had been unspeakable. If Mother did that to his Teddy … his Teddy who was like a part of himself. … The fierce fighting look had come into Stephen’s eyes and under the soft curves of rounded baby flesh he set his jaw.
But he had said nothing to Mother as they tore back across town, Mother in a hurry about getting her supper on time. Mother prided herself on never yet having set a meal on the table a single minute late. He said nothing, partly because he had no breath left over from his wild leaps from curb to paving and from paving to curb; and partly because he had not the slightest idea how to express the alarm, the bleeding grief, within him. Stephen’s life so far had developed in him more capacity for screaming and kicking and biting than for analyzing and expressing his feelings in words.
That night Mother had taken Teddy away—treacherously, while Stephen was asleep. The next morning she announced that now she thought of the dirt and microbes on Teddy it made her shudder and as soon as she found time she would wash him and give him back to Stephen. Stephen had been filled with a silent frenzy every time he thought of it.
But now he had found Teddy, held him again in his arms that had ached for emptiness these three nights past. Stephen’s hot little warrior’s heart softened to love and quiet as he sat there; and presently there came to his calmer mind the plan to go to tell Mother about it. If he told her about it, maybe she wouldn’t take Teddy away and spoil him.
He went downstairs to find Mother, his lower lip trembling a little with his hope and fear, as Mother had not seen it since Stephen was a little tiny baby. Nor did she see it this time.
He went to the kitchen door and looked in, and instantly knew through a thousand familiar channels that it would do no good to tell Mother, then—or ever. The kitchen was full, full to suffocation with waves of revolt, and exasperation, and haste, and furious determination, which clashed together in the air above that quivering, energetic figure kneeling on the floor. They beat savagely on the anxious face of the little boy. He recognized them from the many times he had felt them and drew back from them, an instant reflection of revolt and determination lurid on his own face. How could he have thought, even for a moment, of telling Mother!
He turned away clutching Teddy and looked about him wildly. All around him was the inexorable prison of his warm, clean, well-ordered home. No escape. No appeal. No way to protect what was dear to him! There fell upon him that most sickening and poisonous of human emotions, the sensation of utter helplessness before physical violence. Mother would take Teddy away and do whatever she pleased with him because she was stronger than Stephen. The brute forces of jungle life yelled loud in Stephen’s ears and mocked at his helplessness.
But Stephen was no Henry or Helen to droop, to shrink and quail. He fled to his own refuge, the only one which left him a shred of human dignity: fierce, hopeless, endless resistance: the determination of every brave despairing heart confronted with hopeless odds, at least to sell his safety dear; to fight as long as his strength held out: never, never to surrender of his own accord. Over something priceless, over what made him Stephen, the little boy stood guard savagely with the only weapons he had.
First of all he would hide. He would hold Teddy in his arms as long as he could, and hide, and let Mother call to him all she wanted to, while he braced himself to endure with courage the tortures which would inevitably follow … the scolding which Mother called “talking to him,” the beating invisible waves of fury flaming at him from all over Mother, which made Stephen suffer more than the physical blows which always ended things, for by the time they arrived he was usually so rigid with hysteria himself that he did not feel them much.
Under the stairs … she would not think of that for a long time. He crept in over the immaculately clean floor, drew the curtains back of him, and sat upright, cross-legged, holding Teddy to his breast with all his might, dry-eyed, scowling, a magnificent sulphurous conflagration of Promethean flames blazing in his little heart.