Читать книгу Our Miss Boo - Margaret Lee Runbeck - Страница 8

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We don’t have punishment in our house. But goodness knows what it is we do have. Theories, I guess.

We have a theory that regret without grief makes more intelligent discipline. Repentance of the intellect instead of the heart, is our aim; since the heart is a sensitive little instrument intended not for hammering nails, but for telling time forever.

In our code children aren’t naughty; they’re only silly and unwise. You decide (from consequences) that you’ve been unwise. But you’re not utterly crushed about it, for you think more wisely when you are unclouded by sorrow. And the next day you do better. That’s the theory.

Sometimes it works.

But always it requires great patience and nimbleness and sportsmanship ... and all of these, it seems, on the part of the parent. Whatever else our method does, it certainly is going to develop the character of the parent.

But naughtiness is a fascinating weed. If you’ve seldom heard it mentioned in your own home, you get the idea that it’s a thrilling luxury afforded only by the blissfully underprivileged.

Punishment, too, is one of the exciting adventures that you hear about in whispers from your friends. A mad, exuberant feud that embellishes the lives of some children. But not dull people like us, to whom nothing happens.

At least, that’s my reluctant theory about our theory.

Well, anyway. It was nearly midnight, and as I came up to my bedroom, I glanced upstairs to the next level, and there, lying along the floor, was a thin thread of light under the door of the linen closet.

“Lilliam’s forgotten the light again,” I thought as I went up to turn it off.

But when I opened the door with its delicious waft of lavender and linen, there was something else. Some one four years old, but ancient in guilt. Standing on top of a laundry hamper, she had a smear of chocolate across one cheek, and a jaw full of sticky cream fondant. A half-demolished candy Easter egg, four months’ stale, was sitting beside the fancy box in which it had been packed and forgotten.

“What are you doing?”

“I ... I got hungry,” she said around the fondant.

“But you’ve been asleep for hours. And how did you know that disgusting egg was in here?”

“I ... I look at it sometimes,” she murmured guiltily. “I look at it every single day. And now I got terribly hungry for it.”

It was the old tree of knowledge pattern, ludicrously small-scale.

I washed her off and she brushed her teeth grimly, and we had nothing at all to say. Until she was back in her bed again. Then I sat down in her small rocking chair and gave her the works.

“I really can’t understand it, Miss Boo,” I said, not at all truthfully.

“I splained it to you,” she said, and the point certainly went to her on that round. “Don’t let’s discuss about it any more, please.”

“Indeed we shall discuss it, “I said sternly. “You know we do everything possible for your good. And if there is anything that you think would be good for you, you have only to ask us and we’ll see.”

She yawned sleepily. All this was trite going. Old stuff.

“It’s never going to be necessary for you to deceive me about anything. You know that. You don’t have to sneak into closets to do things.”

Then I tried a new approach. A new grip on my audience, who was slipping away from me.

“You’re a reasonable human being,” I said. “You tell me what you think I ought to do about it.”

Interest flickered up. “Don’t let’s do anything,” she said with winsome cheerfulness.

But I was relentless. “Suppose you had a little girl whom you loved very much. You wanted her to be happy and well, and you did everything you could for her ...”

“I’d give her lovely bath salts in her bath,” she said. “I’d let her put on nail polish sometimes. Just for fun.”

“Suppose your little girl got up from her bed without calling any one, and came down the stairs and slipped into the linen closet ...”

“I’d keep her tied in bed,” she said reproachfully. “I wouldn’t want her to fall out, the dear little thing.”

“We kept you tied in,” I said, defending my standing jealously. “But now you’re big enough.... And suppose she took nasty old stale candy. What would you do to make her remember?”

She sat up in bed earnestly. Her viewpoint was suffused now with a righteous parent-indignation. She had thrown herself so utterly into the rôle that she had forgotten all policy.

“If I had a little girl that did such things ... after I’d been so lovely to her, and given her a beautiful new bathrobe, and let her put powder on her tummy ... if she got out of bed and ’ceeved me, why I’d turn her over my knee and spank her.”

The room was embarrassed by silence for a long moment. The whole thing had got pretty badly out of bounds, for both of us. She slid down into her bed, and I got up awkwardly.

“Well,” I said limply. “Good night, darling.”

“Good night,” she said, equally meek. “Don’t let’s us discuss about our children any more. Hmn?”

“All right,” I said. “Go to sleep now.”