In a moment, “Say, Stephen, how’d you like to beat up a pretend egg?” he asked.
Stephen glowered at him suspiciously, but with a spark of unwilling curiosity in his dark eye.
“Like this,” said his father. He wheeled himself to the shelf, took down a tin basin, filled it with warm water, put a bit of soap into it and began to whip it to a froth with an eggbeater.
Stephen’s face lightened. Ever since he could remember he had seen his mother playing with that fascinating toy; ever since he could remember he had put his hand out for it; ever since he could remember his mother had said, “No, no, you’d only make a mess,” and had hung it up out of reach.
He had gone too far towards a nervous explosion to be able to say “Oh, goody!” or “Give it to me!” but he held out his hand silently. His father took no notice of his sullen expression and did not offer to show him how it worked.
Stephen set the eggbeater in the water and with perfect confidence began to try to turn the handle. He always had perfect confidence that he could do anything he tried. At once the eggbeater slipped sideways and fell to the floor. Stephen frowned, picked it up and held it tighter with his left hand. But he found that when he put his attention on his left hand to make it hold tight, his right hand refused to make the round-and-round motion he so much admired. He had never before tried to do two different things with his two hands. He took his attention off his left hand and told his right hand to make the circular motion. Instantly the whole thing began to slip. As instantly he flashed his mind back on his left hand and caught the beater before it fell. But at once his right hand, left to itself, stopped turning.
“For him, it’s just like trying to pat your head and rub your stomach,” reflected Lester.
Stephen was disconcerted by the unexpected difficulty of the undertaking. He stood still a moment in the mental attitude of a man who has caught a runaway pig by the ear and a hind leg and does not dare let go. He breathed hard and frowned at the perverse creature of steel in his hand.
His father felt as the spectators at a prizefight feel when the second round begins. He prayed violently that nothing might interrupt the rest of the bout. Especially did he pray that the old Anderson imbecile might not come in. If she did, he would just throw the stove-lid at her head. What was he for, if not to protect Stephen from marauding beasts of prey? He himself did not make a motion for fear of distracting Stephen’s attention.
The little boy went at it again, but with none of his first jaunty cocksureness, cautiously, slowly, turning the handle a little at a time. He made no progress whatever. The combination of the two dissimilar motions was too much for him. If someone had held the eggbeater still, he could have turned the handle, he knew that. But he would never ask anyone to do it. He would do it himself. Himself! He tried again and again without the slightest success and began to put on the black, savage look he had for things that displeased him.
His father followed with sympathy as he toiled forward into the unmapped jungle of his own mind. How he stuck at it, the little tyke! And how touching was his look of outraged indignation at his own unruly right hand! His father said to himself, half-laughing, half-wistful, “Poor old man! We’ve all been there! That painful moment when we first realize that our right hands are finite and erring!”
He shook with silent mirth over the sudden, hot-tempered storm which followed in a tropical gust, when Stephen stamped his feet, ground his teeth, and, turning red and purple with rage, tried by main strength to master the utensil. He turned his eyes discreetly down on his darning when Stephen, with a loud “Gol darned old thing!” threw the eggbeater across the kitchen. He felt Stephen suddenly remember that his father was there and glance apprehensively up at him. He chose that moment to stoop again to the oven door and gaze fixedly in at the bland face of the rice pudding.
But he did not see it. He saw Stephen’s fiery little nature at grips with itself, and inaudibly he was cheering him on, “Go to it, Stevie! Get your teeth in it! Eat it up!” He was painfully, almost alarmingly interested in the outcome. Would Stephen conquer, or would he give up? Was there real stuff behind that grim stubbornness which had given them such tragic trouble? Or was it just hatefulness, as the Mrs.-Anderson majority of the world thought it? He held a needle up to the light and threaded it elaborately. But he was really looking at Stephen, standing with his stout legs wide apart, glowering at the prostrate but victorious eggbeater. In spite of his sympathetic sense of the seriousness of the moment Lester’s diaphragm fluttered with repressed laughter. Cosmic Stephen in his pink gingham rompers!
He took up another stocking and ran his hand down the leg. Stephen sauntered over towards the beater, casually. He glanced back to see if he need fear any prying surveillance of his private affairs, but his father’s gaze was concentrated on the hole in the stocking. Carelessly, as though it were an action performed almost absentmindedly, Stephen stooped, picked up the beater, and stood holding it, trying experiments with various ways of managing that maddening double action. His clumsiness, his muscular inexpertness with an unfamiliar motion, astounded his father. How far back children had to begin! Why, they did not know how to do anything! Not till they had learned.
This did not seem to him the trite platitude it
