A Little Boy's Utopia

MY little nephew was three and a half when he began to talk about ‘the Stewart Country,’ and between five and six when he gave us to understand that the subject was forever closed. The origin of the name was a mystery we never fathomed. Asked why it was called so, he would say, ‘That is its name’ with the patience born of answering many foolish questions. He described it as ‘ that far land where I lived when Mulla was a little gayl, too little to be my mulla’; and professed to be able to visit it at will. It had taken a long time to come from it in the first place, but it was no distance to go back; there was nothing between here and there. Nothing for him, that is to say. ‘ If you went, you ’d have to go in a ship, and you could n’t, because the sailors don’t allow any ladies to go on board that ship.’

It was the perfection that atoned for all the imperfections of this world. Did the supply of milk run short? ‘In the Stewart Country the milk jug is always full; you can keep pouring out and pouring out and it never gets empty.’ Was he refused a coveted toy in a shopwindow on the ground of cost? ‘In the Stewart Country you would just walk into the shop and ask how much it costed, and the shopkeeper would say, “Nothing,” and wrap it up in a parcel, and give it to you.’

The economic question, that crux of idealists, was settled in a delightfully simple manner.

‘There’s just one cent in the whole country. You pay one cent and eat as much as you like, and the next person that wants to eat anything pays the same cent. You can get all the dinner you want there for a cent. It’s not like the dinner you get here. You go out and pick it, and then you sit down on the grass and eat it. Grapes and oynges and pomatoes and apples, as many as you want.’ And by a beautiful arrangement of the digestive system one was secure against the fatality that overtakes little boys in this world when desire fails before the dessert appears. ‘ In the Stewart Country, your dinner does n’t get on top of your appetite. You slip your dinner under and the appetite stays on top.’

When cross-examined as to how one fared when the fruit season was over, his answer seemed to me then, and still seems, an extraordinary flight into metaphysics for a mind so young.

‘ Time does n’t go away in the Stewart Country: it’s time all the time. Grapepicking time does n’t get past,’ he went on to explain — he was helping, more or less, to pack away the last gleanings of our small vineyard in boxes of cork sawdust as he spoke. ‘It stays grapepicking time. Little boys don’t grow up to be men. I was just the same size I am now all the time I lived in the Stewart Country. I only died down into a little baby at the end of the jayney, when I was coming to my mulla.’

I don’t know whether there is any other boy on record to whom the phrase, ‘When I’m a man,’ was absolutely without charm. He was never going to be a man. He’d lawtha stay just a little boy. When it dawned upon him that he had no choice in the matter, terror seized him. ‘But I don’t want to be a man! Can’t I stay a little boy?’ Helpless rage succeeded. ‘I won’t be a man! ’

Then was proved the wisdom of having a second world in reserve.

‘ I won’t be a man’ — gently, this time, if firmly. ‘Before I grow up, I’ll go back to the Stewart Country for good. There are n’t any men there — not a bit of a man.’

Not a bit of a woman, either. No grown-up people, no babies, no girls. It was a world of boys, eleventy and a hundred strong. And being so many, they had fine times — the wildest, recklessest, uncarablest times; why, they did the very things they knew would give them colds; only in the Stewart Country there were no colds. They had more fun than even the ten little Donaghues playing leap-frog in their backyard — who, after all, were only ten times better off than an only child. In his more pessimistic moods, this only child was wont to declare that when he went out to play he sat silent on the lowest rung of a ladder with his feet in a pile of ashes. Can one play leap-frog alone? he asked you!

‘When I lived in the Stewart Country’— I can hear the change of tone that marked the familiar opening: it was a kind of half-sad droning, a tone that seems naturally to associate itself with reminiscences of happier days. The eyes, too, lost their habitual laughter and took on a faraway look.

‘I lived in a blue house with a yellow roof. There was green grass all around it and a tree with oynges on it. I sat on the grass and my Stewart Country lamb climbed up into the tree and threw the oynges down to me.’

One could imagine that absorbed gaze fastened upon the actual scene.

Grass was a prominent feature in the pictures he painted for us. In that ideal climate the grass was always soft and warm and dry and green, and you could sit down on it any day of the year. It never rained in the Stewart Country, never froze. If little boys wanted to skate, an accommodating Jack Frost made mica and stuck it onto the ground instead of tayning the water into ice. No blankets were needed there, no beds. In fact, there was no bedtime. If you were toyd, you just lay down on the grass and rested in the sunshine; it never got dark. The horses ran kneedeep in grass all the year round, and had n’t to go into stables or be fed with hay.

His mother suggested that perhaps it was of heaven he was thinking. But no. ‘In heaven we are n’t.’ A reflective pause; then uneasily, ‘Mulla, I feel as if I would n’t be able to see any surroundings in heaven. Will there be other persons onto us then?' No, screw up his eyes as he would, he could n’t get heaven into focus. He turned with relief to the vision of the land so evidently real to him. ’There I’m the same little boy I am here, and I can see all the way to the trees where the sky bends down to the ayth, so far away they look like only half-breeded trees.’

’When I lived in the Stewart Country,’ — ‘ When I go back to the Stewart country’ — Magic phrases both, and full of solace; but there was a third that yielded more solid satisfaction than either. ‘That’s nothing! You should see what I saw in the Stewart Country! ’

We others, who had only a restricted sphere to draw upon for our good stories, were at a disadvantage; the small boy could easily cap the best of them.

It was the description of a skillful feat in a log-rolling contest that drew forth this trifling effort of imagination: ‘ In the Stewart Country I saw a boy do that very same thing, but while he was doing it he wove both feet gracefully round his head twice.’

‘My Stewart Country lamb’ was the hero of many of those wonderful tales. It was the Stewart Country lamb that swam out to his rescue and towed his canoe to land, when he lost his paddle in the middle of the pond. It was the Stewart Country lamb that climbed upon the yellow roof of his blue house and putted out a fire. The capabilities of the animal seemed equaled only by its good-will. It never waited to be asked for assistance: you had only to look toyd and it took your work out of your hands and finished it. Sewing gold braid on a blue velvet suit, currycombing Bat and Crochet Needle — it made no difference what: the Stewart Country lamb was ready for it all. It became a family proverb for versatility and resourcefulness. ‘The S.C.L. could not do better than that!’ we would say.

One day a relic of some past era of domestic art was unearthed from the store-room — a huge pincushion of white canton flannel in the shape of an animal. But what animal? The question was being discussed in the language of the old primers. ‘Is — it — a — cat ? ’ ‘ No — it — is — a — goat.’ Someone was trying to lift it by an imaginary tail, to see if it was a guinea pig. The little boy sat gazing at the object in a kind of trance.

All at once his arms opened wide.

‘My Stewart Country lamb!’

The contrast between the animal of our proverb and this image of ineptness was almost too much for us. It is to our credit that no audible laughter marred the impressiveness of that reunion.

Not long afterward, I had a further illustration of how hard to follow is the line between reality and make-believe in a child’s mind. Winter had set in with disagreeable abruptness, and I had been begging to be taken to the land where it was always summer, only to be met by a reminder of the inexorable sailors, to whom no woman need apply. When an attack of neuralgia laid me low, ‘This would n’t have happened,’ I reproached the small boy, ‘if you had done as I asked.’

He regarded me seriously.

‘Payhaps,’ he said slowly, as if the words were being dragged from him against his will, ‘just for one time the sailors might let just one lady on board. Be ready to-morrow and I’ll call for you and take you to the ship. Have your suitcase packed. I ’ll go home now and pack mine.’

He had told me some weeks before of seeing a butterfly start off to the Stewart Country to escape the cold weather, with a melon-seed for a suitcase and a pine-needle for its handle. I imagined to-morrow’s trip a flight as fanciful — or at the solidest, such a sleigh-ride as Peer gave his old mother. It was a distinct shock to have a small boy appear at my bedroom door next morning with a field-glass slung over one shoulder, always the last touch when he dressed for actual traveling.

‘Are n’t you ready to go to the Stewart Country? The sleigh’s at the door.’

I somehow found it hard to meet those wide-open eyes.

‘Would n’t it do to go in the bed?’ I temporized. ‘You see, I’m not able to get up yet. I’d be afraid to go out on such a cold day.'

‘Afraid! Why, nobody’s ever sick in the Stewart Country. The minute you get there you '11 be well. Hurry up, or the sailors will be gone home to dinner before we get to the ship. Never mind your suitcase. Mulla said never mind mine when she saw me packing it.’

The scene was described to me later — an old suitcase open on the floor; in it a bottle of cologne, a cake of shavingsoap, a hand-mirror, a necktie, a pair of kid gloves; the small boy intent on turning drawers inside out.

‘She would n’t let me put it into the sleigh. But it does n’t matter about clothes in the Stewart Country. We can do with what we have on; and if we want any more, my Stewart Country lamb will make them. C’m’ on; Sam’s waiting for us. Hurry up! The longer you lie there, the wayser you’ll get.’

He had such a forge-ahead, fullsteam-up air, that to this day it is matter for regret that I could n’t have got dressed and gone down with him to the sleigh, if only to see what would happen next. Where would he have ordered Sam to drive? How long would he have kept that look of resolve fixed in proportion to the struggle it had cost? And in the end, would he have acknowledged it all a game? I can’t believe it. In some dark corner of my mind there lingers a suspicion that I did on that morning lose my one opportunity of visiting the Stewart Country.

As matters were, I had to bear the odium of calling the journey off myself. It is n’t pleasant to be looked at as that small boy looked at me.

‘Good-bye, then. I may as well go home. You need n’t ask me to take you ever any more. The sailors said they’d let you on board this one day, but it was t he last time. And the sailors don’t like to be fooled.’

As might have been expected, it was upon the economic rock that this Utopia was finally wrecked, although the daily growing strength of rival interests in our own world may have been a contributory cause.

‘I have n’t heard you speak of the Stewart Country lately,’ I said one day. ‘Don’t you ever go there now?’

‘No,’ was the decided answer. ‘The last letter I got said, “ You need n’t come here any more unless you’ve got a lot of cents in your pocket, for you can’t, buy anything for one cent now.”’

After this, it plainly annoyed him to be questioned about the land he had once described so willingly. At last he found a way to put an end to all such questioning.

‘There is no Stewart Country. It was mine to do what I liked with, and I blew it up with dynamite.’

‘ And the little boys? ’

‘I put them all on the ship and sent them away first. Then I waited till it blew up and came away on the burst.’

A marvelous country, even in its dissolution!