Figliuolo Learns to Read

— Figliuolo was a disgraceful illiterate, to begin with ; there was no doubt about that. As he turned the sixth milestone, it was growing to be a notorious scandal, over which the chief courtiers held frequent and serious debate. Not that he actually knew nothing, or cared nothing, for the immortal heroes of the nursery. Quite the contrary. From earliest infancy he had splashed in his bath amid the goodly company of the Waterbabies. As fearless and frisky as Adjidaumo himself, he had been almost daily an unwearied companion of Hiawatha’s huntings and fishings.

There was in the palazzo a shabby old black traveling-bag, to which clung lovingly strange pasted bits of Turkish hieroglyph and numberless other illegible inscriptions. It was a relic of the days when there was no Figliuolo, and the prime minister had tasted the salty sweets of exile, known the weariness of Capri’s rock-cut stairs and of many another clamber in farthest Bohemia. The magic of an unjaded imagination had easily converted this bag into the birch canoe. Propelled by a pair of weary-looking battledoors, Figliuolo swept proudly across the wide-wayed nursery to the conquest of the great sturgeon Nahma, or to desperate strife with the deathless Mudjekeewis. As Odysseus’ raft-boat, the same craft endured perils and disasters more manifold than Zeus’ wrath or Apollo’s vengeance could devise. Or, again transformed by yet bolder creative fancy, it was paddled to rescue from his lonely rock that best beloved fellow-rebel and fellow-captive, Prometheus, tied up for meddling with the fire. Becoming in turn a sled, it had borne Figliuolo with Andersen’s gentler children through the ice-palaces of the north, or floated, as Däumelinchen’s leaf, down the ever-flowing river of childish imagination.

Indeed, that was just the trouble, or a large part of it. Madonna, like the rest of the household, was familiar with the theories of modern pedagogy. Various modifications of the picture method had been called to his highness’s languid attention often, already, through the long years. But of all the illustrations in the Father’s great picture-book, the twenty-six “grievous emblems” (Iliad vi. 168) had retained, to his mind, the minimum of picturesqueness in their slow evolution from Egyptian or Phœnician House and Camel to plain Saxon B or G. They appealed, indeed, as it seemed, far less to this vagrant fancy than had the ten digits of our Arabian inheritance.

Finally, the subject matter itself of the elementary textbooks drew down the prompt and righteous contempt of the far-wandered scholar. “ Why should I care if the cat has the rat, or has not the rat ? ‘ That is the kind of thing in all children’s reading-books’? Yes, and I do not care for such things. I have decided never to learn to read at all. I do not care if the Lady Alicia ” (a contemporary and a cousin) “has learned. She may care for such stories, and she may read them. I like what older people read to me a great deal better.”

Here the subject lapsed, — from lack of material for effective retort, if (as Just says) “ the truth must out.” But for several days there was great and general dearth of leisure at story-time and reading-hour, until the princely appetite had whetted itself to its keenest edge. Then one day Madonna sauntered in from town, and dropped a wide, flat package, without remark, on the “ Round Table of the nursery.” To strip off the paper was a privilege hardly requiring renewal by special grant. From within appeared, like a resplendent chrysalis, an abridged baby version of Alice in W onderland. The cover alone was a blaze of color. The illustrations were copious and brilliant, the type of the largest, the words enticingly monosyllabic.

“ Oh, it’s mine, is n’t it, Madonna ? ”

“No, indeed, Figliuolo, it is my own.”

“Why, you don’t care for such a book as that, do you, Madonna ? ”

“ Yes, indeed ; it is a very fine story, and very funny besides.”

“ And will you read it aloud, so I can hear it, too ? ”

“I don’t think I shall have any time for that.”

During a pause that followed the pictures were appreciatively studied, and even the large, clear type received tolerant notice.

“But, Madonna, this seems like a book that I should like a great deal more than you.”

“ It would n’t be of any use to you, because you can’t read it, and you are never going to learn.”

“ Would it have been mine if I knew how to read ? ”

“ Well, yes, I think perhaps it might have been.”

The next pause was a weighty one, and the following query, though spontaneous, quivered with suppressed excitement : “ And — if I did learn to read it, Madonna, would you be willing to give it to me ? ”

“ Well, yes, I think if you should really read it through, every word, you would deserve to own it.”

So the struggle began anew, with the important difference that the full strength of a will— not “ broken ”— was enlisted on the affirmative side of the argument. Into the next weeks some rain did fall, some days were darkened, but never to the verge of despair, nor was there ever a hint of desertion. The languid efforts of the past were not all wasted. Even the cat, if not the rat, found her proper place, after all.

Soon the difficulty was to repress the eager efforts at following out the laws of analogy ; to check, without too rude discouragement, the mind so rational that it assumed that cough would be spelled like off, or pronounced like hiccough. Some of these problems, indeed, exhausted the philological resources of the realm. The multitudinous origins of English speech were discussed with interest. The superfluous w of sword was apologized for as a survival from German Schwert, etc. Still, Funk and Fauntleroy would easily have gained in those days a doughty third champion of Fouetics.

The great fight, however, was won. A few months later, the trophy, itself sadly dimmed and worn in the struggle, passed, duly inscribed, into the conqueror’s unquestioned possession. The next summer was spent among the mountains. On the first rainy day, when even the shifting fringes of the great cloud-curtain that overhung Mount Lafayette were beginning to grow monotonous, there appeared from the wellstored trunk of the king’s own treasures a new copy of the complete Alice, Many an hour was spent over it from that day on, with only an occasional audible chuckle from his quiet corner to remind us of the “Presence.” There are still books and books, and the functions of the royal taster have never been delegated ; but Figliuolo is a reader.