Part 8

About a week before the end of the month a great step toward intercommunication by speech took place. We began to suspect that the baby knew her own name, she turned to look so often just after it had been spoken. To test it I stood behind her, and in an ordinary tone accosted her as Bobby, Tom, Kitten, Mary, Jacob, Baby, and all sorts of other names. Whenever I said Ruth, Toodles, or Toots, she turned and looked expectantly at me, but not at any other name. Now, Ruth is our baby’s proper name; so it was evident that she really did have some inkling of the sound that meant her.

Not that she could rise yet to any such abstract conception as that of a person or of a name. But she had learned that this sound was connected with interesting experiences--with frolics, and caresses, and trips outdoors, with relief from discomforts, with dinners, and all the other things that happened when people were attending to her. It was out of such a beginning as this that full understanding of articulate speech, in all its logical intricacy, was to develop.

One of the most marked traits of the latter weeks of this month was the surprising rapidity with which things were grouping themselves in the baby’s mind by association, in a way that came nearer and nearer to definite memory. She coaxed for a spoon, and when she got it was still discontented, till we found that she wished it to have milk in, as she knew befitted a spoon--though for the milk itself she did not care at all. She understood what particular frolic was to be expected from each of us. She turned, when she saw reflections, to look for the real object. She made demonstrations of joy when she saw her baby carriage, knowing well what it portended.

In two or three cases, there was at last unmistakable evidence of true memory, for at least a few minutes. For instance, in the last week of the month, sitting on her mother’s lap, the baby caught sight of a knot of loops that adorned the centre of an ottoman close by, and reached her arms for it. By way of a joke on her, her mother set her on the ottoman. It was quite beyond the baby’s sense of locality to divine what had become of the knot, and she looked all about her diligently to find it, leaning this way and that. By and by her mother took her back into her arms to nurse; but all the time she was nursing, she would stop now and then, sit up, and lean over to look for the lost knot.

At another time, when her mother came into the room with a new hat on, she reached out her hands for it with delight; her mother retreated at once, and put the hat safely out of sight, but when some minutes later the baby saw her again, her first look was at the top of her head, and seeing it now bare of lace and buttercups, she broke into a disappointed whimper.

All this time practice in her earlier attainments went vigorously on. She was watching, handling, reaching after things, all day long. Especially she watched all the movements of people; often, now, as they went in and out of doors, as they were seen through windows, came into sight or disappeared around corners. She must have been getting thus some idea of the way walls acted in shutting out her view, and of the relation of visible and invisible positions.

She had perhaps more troubles in this month than ever before, what with some fear of people, and the discomforts connected with her first pair of teeth, and also with the beginning of the weaning period. There were a number of days when her health and spirits were considerably depressed, and there was a good deal of fretting. When the teeth were fairly through, and the insufficient food supplemented, her spirits came up with a bound, and she was more joyous than ever.

She had her first skin pain in this month--a scratched finger from a clasp on my shoulder--and wailed with vigor; yet it was forgotten in a few moments, and never thought of again. It was evident that skin sensitiveness was still low, and that hurts left no after soreness.

It was about ten days before the end of the month that she first showed a decided emotional dependence on her mother. She had been separated from her for some time (by a tedious dentist’s engagement), had become hungry and sleepy, and had been frightened by an abrupt stranger. At last she settled into a pitiful, steady crying--stopping at every angle in the corridor where I walked with her, and watching eagerly till it was turned, then breaking out anew when her mother did not prove to be around the corner. This tragic experience left a much deeper mark than the physical woes, and for some days the baby watched her mother rather anxiously, as if she feared she might lose her again unless she kept her eyes constantly upon her.

And so she was come to the end of her first half year. The breathing automaton had become an eager and joyous little being, seeing and hearing and feeling much as we do, knowing her own body somewhat, and controlling it throughout to a certain extent, laughing and frolicking, enjoying the vision of the world with a delicious zest, clinging to us not so much for physical protection as for human companionship, beginning to show a glimmer of intelligence, and to cross over with sign and sound the abyss between spirit and spirit.

X

BEGINNINGS OF LOCOMOTION

When a baby has learned to see things clearly, and has known the joys of handling them, it is natural that he should soon come to feel the need of getting to them when they chance to lie beyond arm reach. Apparently the first impulse to move the whole body does always come from this desire to get at something; but I doubt if this remains a very important motive throughout the whole process of learning. There is so much in that process that is instinctive that the baby seems to be in great part taken up and carried on by a current of blind impulse. Then, too, the whole structure of bone, and joint, and muscle is so fitted to certain positions and movements that in the mere chance exercising of his limbs he is steadily brought nearer to the great race acts of balance and locomotion.

One might suppose that with babies sprawling, creeping, and toddling on every hand, we should not lack evidence on the beginnings of human locomotion; but as a matter of fact, the stage that precedes walking is involved in a good deal of confusion. Records are scanty, and children seem to vary a good deal in their way of going at the thing. Most of them “creep before they gang”; but there seems to be a stage before creeping, when, if the child is given full freedom of movement, he will get over the floor in some cruder way, rolling, hitching, dragging himself by the elbows, humping forward measure-worm fashion, or wriggling along like a snake. Perhaps, as I have already suggested, this is because skirts delay the natural beginning of creeping, and these other movements require less freedom of the legs; perhaps there is some deeper reason connected with race history. Sometimes the baby makes these less efficient movements answer till walking is acquired, and never creeps at all.

Our baby, as we have seen, had already made her first ineffective attempts to pull herself forward and reach something; and lying face down, unable to turn over, had so propped herself with hands and knees that when she tried to move she almost stumbled on creeping unawares. But soon after she was six months old, she discovered the other half of the trick of rolling--reversing herself from front to rear as well as from rear to front; and this gave her such an enlarged freedom that it stopped all aspirations in other directions.

She did not deliberately turn over and over to get anywhere. She simply rolled and kicked about the floor, turning over when she felt like it or when she wished to reach something, highly content, and asking odds of nobody. If by chance she turned in the same direction a number of times in succession, she would drift halfway across the room, meeting no end of interesting things by the way--mamma’s slipper tips, chair rockers, table legs, waste basket, petals dropped from the vases, and so on. It was a great enlargement of life, and kept her happy for six or seven weeks.

During this time, her balance in sitting grew secure, so that she could sit on the floor as long as she chose, occupied with playthings; but she cared more for the rolling.

It was in these weeks, too, that two great new interests came into our baby’s life. The first was a really passionate one, and it seized her suddenly, the week after she was half a year old. The door had just opened to admit a guest, amid a bustle of welcome, when a cry of such desire as we had never heard from our baby in all her little life called our attention to her. Utterly indifferent to the arrival of company (she who had always loved a stir of coming and going, and taken more interest in people than in anything else!) she was leaning and looking out of the window at the dog, as if she had never seen him before--though he had been before her eyes all her life. She would think of nothing else; the guest, expert in charming babies, could not get a glance.

Day after day, for weeks, the little thing was filled with excitement at sight of the shaggy Muzhik, moving her arms and body, and crying out with what seemed intensest joy and longing. When he came near, her excitement increased, and she reached out and caught at him; her face lighted with happiness when he stood close by; she showed not the least fear when he put his rough head almost in her face, but gazed earnestly at it; she watched for him at the window, or from her baby carriage. No person or thing had ever interested her so much. Muzhik, on his part, soon learned to give the snatching little hands a wide berth; and his caution may have enhanced his charm.

Later in the month, she showed somewhat similar excitement at sight of a cow. About the same time, too, she first noticed the pigeons as they flew up from the ground.

This was the beginning of a lasting interest in animals, animal pictures, animal stories. It is not easy to account fully for this interest, appearing in such intense degree, at so early an age. All children show it to some extent, though in many it is mingled with a good, deal of fear. One is tempted to connect both the fear and the interest with race history--the intimate association of primitive man with animals; but a six-month baby is traversing a period of development far earlier than that of the primitive hunter. Professor Sully has some good suggestions about the sympathy between children and animals, but these, too, fail of application to a baby so young. Probably to her the main charm was the movement, the rough resemblance to people, joined with so many differences, now first noticed with the interest of novelty--and (as later incidents made me suspect) the quantity of convenient hair to be pulled.

The other new interest waked late in the seventh month: that joy in outdoors that was for many months of the little one’s life her best happiness. Up to this time, she had liked to be taken out in her baby carriage, but mainly for the motion. Now, one morning, grandma took her and sat down quietly on the veranda, saying that she wanted her to learn to love the sunshine, the birds and flowers and trees, without needing the baby carriage and its motion. The little one sat in her lap, looking about with murmurs of delight; and after that, her happiness in rolling about freely was much greater when we spread a blanket on veranda or lawn, and laid her there. Within two weeks, she would coax to be taken outdoors, and then coax till she was put down out of arms, and left to her own happiness. She would roll about by the hour, the most contented baby in the world, breaking occasionally into cries and movements of overflowing joy.

I did not think that at this age the novel sights and sounds outdoors had much to do with her pleasure; she did not yet notice them much. Nor could it have been the wideness and freedom of outlook, for she had not yet come to distant seeing--a hundred feet was as far as I had ever seen her look. Later, all this counted; but now I thought that the mere physical effect of activity in the fresh air, together with the bright light, and perhaps the moving and playing of lights in the leaves, must make up most of the charm.

In the early weeks of the seventh month idle baby’s rollicking spirits were striking; in fact, she became for a time quite a little rowdy, ho-ho-ing and laughing in loud, rough tones, snatching this way and that, clutching at our hair with exultant shouts and clamor. In the latter part of the month, her manners were better--indeed, it was fully a year before I saw them as bad again; but she was much given to seizing at our faces, flinging herself at them with cries and growls (exactly as if she had been playing bear), and mouthing and lightly biting them. And indeed it must be confessed that while our baby’s behavior was often very pretty for weeks together, she had many fits of rough play and hoydenish spirits, and our faces and hair were never quite safe from romping attacks before she was two years old. This boisterousness was not overflowing spirits (real joyousness showed itself more gently) and I could never trace its psychological origin.

At intervals during the month, she continued to improve her bodily knowledge of herself, investigating her head and face and even the inside of her mouth, with her fingers; she rubbed her forefinger curiously with her thumb; she ran out her tongue and moved it about, trying its motions and feeling her lips. And the very first day of the month there had appeared that curious behavior that we call “archness” and “coquetting” in a baby (though anything so grown up as real archness or coquetry is impossible at this age), looking and smiling at a person who was somewhat strange, but very amusing, to her, then ducking down her head when he spoke, and hiding her face on her mother’s shoulder. Whatever the real reason of such behavior may be, there is plainly self-consciousness in it. So, too, when, at seven months old, she began to try deliberately to attract the interest of callers, wrinkling up her nose with a friendly grimace till they paid attention to her.

Both these forms of self-consciousness were common after this. Neither is what we could call human or rational self-consciousness. Any dog or kitten will show them. But they certainly are something more than mere bodily feeling of self. If we need a name for it, we might call it a beginning of _intelligent self-perception_, as distinguished both from bodily self-feeling, and rational self-knowledge--in which the mind, years later, will say to itself clearly, “This is _I_.”

We now began to suspect (as she ended her seventh month) that the baby was beginning to connect our names with us; and when we tried her by asking, “Where is grandpa?” or “mamma” or “aunty,” she really did look at the right one often enough to raise a presumption that she knew what she was about. The association of name and person was still feeble and shaky, but it proved to be real. In a few days it was firm as to grandpa (who was quite _persona grata_, because he built up blocks for her to knock down, and carried her about from object to object, to let her touch and examine); and in a week or two as to the rest of us.

Professor Preyer complains of teaching babies mere tricks, which have no real relation to their development; and certainly it is a sound rule that self-unfolding, not teaching, is the way in which a baby should develop in the earliest years. But Preyer’s baby learned to wave his hand, and play “patacake,” and show “How big is baby?” and the rest of it, just as other babies do; mammas and nurses cannot resist it. And as long as the babies like it, I do not see that it can do any harm, if it is not overdone. Besides, it may be said that these standard tricks are all closely related to the sign language, and so fall in well with the natural development at this stage. And again, the extreme teachability of the human child is his great superiority over the brute--all our civilization rests on it; and when the time comes that he is capable of receiving training, it may be as well that his power of doing so should be used a little, and that these simple gesture tricks of immemorial nursery tradition are good exercises to begin with. It is possible to make a fetich of “self-development,” beyond all common sense.

At all events, as our baby approached seven months old, her mamma had begun to teach her to wave by-by. For a couple of weeks, the mother would hold up the little hand and wave it at the departing guest, and before long the baby would give a feeble waggle or two after her mother had let go; next, she would need only to be started; and a week after she was seven months old she waved a spontaneous farewell as I left the room. There was a long history of the gesture after that, for it was lost and regained, confused with other hand tricks and straightened out, and altogether played a considerable part in the story of sign language and of memory, which I shall not have time to relate. But at all times it paid for itself in the delight it gave the baby: it reconciled her to almost any parting, and even to going to bed.

Her objection to going to bed, which had been evident since the fifth month, was because she thought sleeping was a waste of good playtime, not because she had any associations of fear and repugnance connected with it. She had never been left to cry herself to sleep alone, but was rocked and sung to in good old fashion. But she did show signs at this time of timidity and distress in waking from sleep, clinging piteously to her mother and crying. She had waked and cried alone a number of times, and, as I have already said, she seemed to have formed some associations of fear in this way. But I think there were deeper reasons for the confused distress on waking, which from now until halfway through the third year appeared at times.

I have spoken several times of the ease with which even we grown people lose our sense of personal identity; and changes in brain circulation make such confusions especially likely at first waking from sleep. With babies, whose feeling of identity is but insecurely established, this must be much more common; moreover, a baby’s conditions of breathing are less regular than ours, and it is probable that as he comes out of sleep, and the circulation and respiration of the waking hours slowly reestablish themselves, he has all sorts of queer, lost feelings. I was pretty sure, from our baby’s behavior I in the next two years, that she struggled back to the firm shores of waking consciousness through dark waters of confusion, and needed a friendly hand to cling to. This, I suspect, is the secret of the wild crying in the night, which doctors call “night terror”: it is not terror, I think, but vague distress, increased by the darkness--loss of self, of direction, of all one’s usual bodily feeling.

In these sensitive states attending sleep it is likely that some of the emotional conditions for life are formed, and the ties between mother and child knit firmest. My observation is that the one the baby loves most is the one that sleeps close by, that bends over him as he struggles confusedly back to waking, and steers him tenderly through the valley of the shadow of sleep; and next, the one that plays most patiently and observantly with him--not the one that feeds him.

In her absorption in her growing bodily activity, the baby had taken no marked steps in intellectual development, though in skill of handling, and in ability to understand what went on about her and put two and two together, she made steady progress. Early in the eighth month, some definite instances of this appeared. She showed a discreet preference at bedtime for anybody rather than her mother, and clung vigorously round my neck or her grandfather’s when that messenger of fate came for her. She dropped things to watch them fall, with a persistent zeal and interest such as she had not shown in earlier experiments of the sort. She knew what it meant if one of us put a hat on, and pleaded with outstretched hands and springing motion to go too. Once she found that in moving a long stick she was moving some twigs at its farther end, and kept up the experiment with curiosity.

It was about this time--the first fortnight of the eighth month--that taste first became a source of pleasure to our baby. She had been given an experimental taste of several things before, but beyond the grimace of surprise (it looks like utmost disgust, but there seems no doubt that it really means surprise only) with which little babies greet new tastes, she had shown no great interest in them. Now, as nature’s supply grew scant, she was introduced more seriously to several supplementary foods, and at least once rejoiced over the taste a good deal. Still, she was apt soon to tire of them, and on the whole taste did not at any time in her first year take a large place among her interests.

As the middle of the eighth month approached, it was evident that an advance in power of movement was coming. The baby was getting up on hands and knees again; she made daily a few aimless creeping movements; and in her bath she would draw herself to her knees, and partly to her feet, holding by the edge of the tub, and somewhat supported by the water. A few days later she drew herself forward a few inches, flat on her stomach, to get something. But she still did not catch the idea of creeping, and rolling remained her great pleasure for another fortnight.

In this fortnight, which brought our baby to eight months old, the rolling grew very rapid and free. She would now roll over and over in the same direction, not to get anywhere in particular (she never learned to use rolling for that purpose), but just for fun. She varied the exercise with the most lively kicking--heels raised in air and brought down together with astonishing vigor and zest; and with twisting about and getting on hands and knees, or even on hands and feet, prattling joyously, and having a beautiful time all by herself, for as long as the authorities would leave her alone. I have no note or memory that she ever tired of it, or asked for attention or change; it was always some one else who interfered, because meal-time or nap-time or something had come.

In the last week of the month she learned to raise herself to a sitting position; and as she could now sit up or lie down at will, she tumbled about the floor with still more variety and enjoyment. In the same week she began to pull herself daily quite to her feet in the tub. It was an ordinary wooden wash-tub which was bridging the interval between her own outgrown one and the grown-up bath-tub; and she would stand, leaning her weight partly on her hands, on the edge of the tub, with her feet planted wide apart, quite on the opposite side, giving her a pretty secure base.

In this fortnight the baby’s understanding of us and feeling of nearness to us were noticeably greater. Her attachment to her favorites was striking. She would cling to us with all the strength of her little arms, sometimes pressing her lips against our faces in a primitive sort of kiss. Her desire for our attention was intense--little arms stretched out, face full of desire, while she uttered urgent cries. Now and then she was entirely unwilling to eat a meal till the person she had set her heart on at the moment had yielded to her pleading, and come to sit close beside her, for company.