I was sitting in a
railway carriage opposite a child who was holding a large elephant on wheels
under its right arm. I cannot remember what the child looked like, but I
remember that the elephant had a skin of grey cloth and a red saddle, and that
the child had squeezed its handkerchief under the saddle, and, pointing to
this, said, as if telling me a secret: “My pocket.” It always comes as a
relief to me when a child ventures some remark of this kind, because when I
meet a strange child for the first time in the presence of grown-up people I do
not, as a rule, find conversation easy. One’s ordinary
conversation seems so far beneath the level of a small child. To say to it, “What
wonderful weather we’ve been having!” would seem an outrage. The child would
merely stare. Thirty or forty years
hence it will have adapted itself to grown-up conversation, and will have
learned to return babble for babble like an ordinary inmate of a railway
carriage. At present it believes that conversation should be as interesting as
the things one thinks about, and that it should either be amusing or informing
and serious. On the other hand, it
does not regard as serious many of the things that you and I regard as serious.
There is no use looking over your paper at it and saying: “Lloyd George seems
to be getting into hot water with the French about the Poles.” It has never
heard of Mr. Lloyd George, or of the French, or of the Poles. The only words in the
sentence that will convey anything to its mind are “hot water,” and these will
call up a picture of somebody putting his toe into a steaming bath and having
to withdraw it hurriedly. This may lead to some
reminiscences of baths of its own and to a conversation on baths in
general--especially on the horror of sitting on in the bath when the plug has
been taken out, and there begins the gurgling of the animal that lives just
under the plug-hole and is always trying to swallow you. One ought not to say “the
animal,” perhaps; it is really called “the demon,” or rather “the demond.”
Anyhow, it is worse than Mr. Lloyd George, worse than the French, worse than
the Poles. Mr. Lloyd George does not at least hide down the waste-pipe and make
gurgling noises. That is why the
problem of making the bath safe for children seems, at the age of six, a matter
of far more urgent public importance than the problem of making the world safe
for democracy. The truth is, perhaps,
that either the child or the grown-up person is a little insane. We should
certainly think a child of six mad if it said the things that men of sixty say
in railway trains. If, for instance, a child of six broke in on a discussion on
the coal dispute with: “Settle the matter once for all. Humph, humph! Like
having a tooth out. Humph! Painful just for the moment. Humph! Feel all the
better for it afterwards. Humph, humph, humph!”--one would carry it off to a
mental specialist to have its bumps examined. On the other hand, if
an elderly gentleman went about carrying a grey elephant with a red saddle
under his arm, and wearing his handkerchief under the elephant’s saddle instead
of in an ordinary pocket, we should regard this as even more convincing proof
of his insanity than his remarks on the coal strike. If he pointed to the
saddle and said with a beaming eye, as if communicating a secret, “My pocket,”
one would undoubtedly change one’s compartment at the next station. And yet, when the child
behaved in this fashion, I experienced not only no alarm, but positive
pleasure. The child and I had now something to talk about. I discovered that it
was devoted not only to elephants, but to all animals--that it liked animals
for toys and animals in stories. “You like animals
better than people?” I asked it after a time. It paused for a moment
to consider whether I was the sort of person to whom one could tell an
important secret. Then it nodded and confessed, ever so shyly, ever so sweetly:
“I like animals and railway junctions.” After that we had a
perfectly engrossing conversation.
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