Do you remember Jervis's holding forth one evening for an hour or so
about our doctor's beautiful humanitarian ideals? C'EST A RIRE! The man
merely regards the J. G. H. as his own private laboratory, where he
can try out scientific experiments with no loving parents to object.
I shouldn't be surprised anyday to find him introducing scarlet fever
cultures into the babies' porridge in order to test a newly invented
serum.
Of the house staff, the only two who strike me as really efficient are
the primary teacher and the furnace-man. You should see how the children
run to meet Miss Matthews and beg for caresses, and how painstakingly
polite they are to the other teachers. Children are quick to size up
character. I shall be very embarrassed if they are too polite to me.
Just as soon as I get my bearings a little, and know exactly what we
need, I am going to accomplish some widespread discharging. I should
like to begin with Miss Snaith; but I discover that she is the niece
of one of our most generous trustees, and isn't exactly dischargeable.
She's a vague, chinless, pale-eyed creature, who talks through her nose
and breathes through her mouth. She can't say anything decisively and
then stop; her sentences all trail off into incoherent murmurings. Every
time I see the woman I feel an almost uncontrollable desire to take her
by the shoulders and shake some decision into her. And Miss Snaith is
the one who has had entire supervision of the seventeen little tots aged
from two to five! But, anyway, even if I can't discharge her, I have
reduced her to a subordinate position without her being aware of the
fact.
The doctor has found for me a charming girl who lives a few miles from
here and comes in every day to manage the kindergarten. She has big,
gentle, brown eyes, like a cow's, and motherly manners (she is just
nineteen), and the babies love her.
At the head of the nursery I have placed a jolly, comfortable
middle-aged woman who has reared five of her own and has a hand with
bairns. Our doctor also found her. You see, he is useful. She is
technically under Miss Snaith, but is usurping dictatorship in a
satisfactory fashion. I can now sleep at night without being afraid that
my babies are being inefficiently murdered.
You see, our reforms are getting started; and while I acquiesce with
all the intelligence at my command to our doctor's basic scientific
upheavals, still, they sometimes leave me cold. The problem that keeps
churning and churning in my mind is: How can I ever instil enough love
and warmth and sunshine into those bleak little lives? And I am not sure
that the doctor's science will accomplish that.