When Straits Them Press

NOWADAYS, we have rather turned the tables upon the peevish adults who, in the last generation, have been used to groan and revolt under the inquisition of their young. For, whereas the growing child, with its ‘Why does n’t God kill the devil?’ or ‘Why is baby?’ now stands gloriously acquitted, the poor parents who prematurely inquired whether baby loved Jesus or even ‘Who made the world?’ are held accountable for all the shattered faiths and incredulous spirits of the present age.

Clearly it is not necessary for the lay mind to declare itself further upon the merits or demerits of the Socratic method; certainly it is with no sense of injury that I call up the inquisitors of my own childhood. They were many, of course, as the enemies of the Psalmist—people who asked questions foolish, unnecessary, impossible. But how they goaded my waking inventive faculties to meet, at their best possible, each new emergency!

The emergencies fresh every morning and renewed every evening, were, perhaps, most pressing in that realm of the abstract, the inexact, the guessable — Sabbath school. Once there, and settled in a certain little yellow chair in a front row of little yellow chairs, I think that my most natural reflex to the strident opening-bell, was, perhaps, the formless apprehension that I was now about to be ‘stumped,’ or the remembrance, with a start, of something that Miss Nellie, our teacher, had told us to do every day that week. In any case, some sort of heart-searching was sure to be forthcoming: probably I should have to tell whether I had copied at school; or whether I had answered back to mother; or whether I had saved any pennies for the heathen babies. At all events, Miss Nellie would think of something disturbing to ask, and the very sound of the little bell was depressing.

It was all very well — thanks to my provident parents — when she only wanted to know how many in the class had been baptized. Even the interesting task of selecting a besetting sin to vaunt as one’s very own was comparatively stimulating and pleasant; indeed, quite a halo hovered about the head of an anæmic little blond who first thought to claim in a childish lisp that her undoing was a Macchiavellian temper. But imagine the shock of being suddenly drawn up by, ‘How many of you children remembered to say your prayers this morning?’ Imagine having Eleanora Forsythe, your next neighbor, fairly rise off her chair to wave her small gloved hand, while you, the minister’s daughter, recalling in dismay your morning’s haste to see the new puppies, could only writhe uneasily into an equivocal position which you hoped might be interpreted into a raised hand and then, scarlet with despair and shame, slink into your chair while your cousin Jacky whispered in your ear that you would go to hell. Jacky’s full name is John Calvin MacFarlane.

Well, inquiry, they say, must be met, and I know I used to feel so.

I cannot in the least forget one certain long-gone day, when, to meet it, straits pressed me most sorely. There was a picture on the lesson-chart that day, which Miss Nellie called a tomb. A woman and some men with inordinately long beards, and wearing red and blue dresses, stood about: one with his hands over his face was Jesus, Miss Nellie said. The verse below these figures was so astonishingly short, by way of Golden Text, that all of us who could spell at all had our hands in the air in an instant. (I never could snap my fingers.) Perhaps there were so many hands that Miss Nellie could not choose. For a moment she looked thoughtful; then ‘Children,’ she said, ‘I want you all to think and tell me which was the saddest day of your lives.’

Eleanora, who could not have read the legend underneath the picture, rose to this with a leer of triumph. ‘When my mother died! ’ cried she, in full exultant tones. A good answer. A very good answer. With this clue, testimonials began to pour in. One boy had two sisters and a brother die of scarlet fever in one week. And one,— Peter Lowe, whose father was in the penitentiary for trying to murder his mother, and whose mother was in the insane asylum, as I remember, — out of an embarrassment of riches, chose the day their barn burned down. So the question went round the class and was approaching me.

Now Providence had been unkind to me. I had really never had a sad day. Of course, I knew what sort of thing it had to be. For example, if your father should come home drunk, like Peter’s father — that would be a sad day. But my father was a minister, and ministers very seldom, if ever, come home drunk. Or, it would be a sad day if your little brother died, like dear little Paul Dombey, and left you all alone with people who did not understand you. But I had six brothers. It was hardly likely that they would all die; and one or two, of course, would hardly count for much of a sorrow when there were still plenty left. In any case, mine were all alive. In despair, I cast about in my memory. There was the day grandfather died; I stayed at home from school, and all the cousins came. That would do at a pinch. No one else that I could think of had ever died, except Mrs. Stivers across the street, and I had not felt sad about that, but only very much relieved that this first dead person that I had ever seen was not chopped and bloody as I had expected, but only white and asleep.

‘And yours, Sarah?’

‘The day little Rebecca died,’ I said.

Now count on Jack to challenge the Westminster Confession itself. He always went on the principle that everything was a lie until startling evidence was produced to the contrary. So it was that, when some interruption — the appearing of a secretary, perhaps, or the disappearing of Miss Nellie — left me to their mercy, I must, to satisfy the feeble faith of my companions, stoutly cross my heart and swear that the said Rebecca was my deceased sister.

‘And she was three days old,’ I pursued hotly, grasping hopefully upon the one point of this dead infant’s history which had always appealed to me as most unusual.

It was a telling stroke. No one had ever deemed it possible that any one could die at so early an age.

‘Did you cry?’ asked Jack.

‘No.’

‘I cried when my mother died,’ Eleanora put in, ‘and I did n’t eat a speck of supper. Did you eat any supper?’

Off my guard, I said, ‘There was n’t any.’

‘Why not?’ urged Jack.

‘I — why — ’ I stammered, ‘ they — I — I was n’t hun — ’ Then suddenly in a burst of despair, not unmixed with defiance, —

‘Because I was n’t born yet,’ I said.

Afterwards, I wished I had taken the day grandfather died — or Mrs. Stivers. It is the value of inquisition, that one learns to choose the best.