Bunker Bean | Page 4

was amazing: a courage, however, that quickly
overreached itself, and was sapped by small defeats. Tumbles down the
slippery stairway, burns from the kitchen stove, began it. When a
prized new sailor hat was blown to the centre of a duck-pond he sought
to recover it without any fearsome self-communing. If faith alone could
uphold one, Bean would have walked upon the face of the waters that
day. But the result was a bald experience of the sensations of the
drowning, and a lasting fear of any considerable body of water. Ever
after it was an adventure not to be lightly dared to cross even the
stoutest bridge.
And flying! A belief that we can fly as the birds is surely not
unreasonable at the age when he essayed it. Nor should a mere failure
to rise from the ground destroy it. One must leap from high places, and
Bean did so. The roof of the chicken house was the last eminence to
have an experimental value. On his bed of pain he realized that we may

not fly as the birds; nor ever after could he look without tremors from
any high place.
Such domestic animals as he encountered taught him further fear. Even
the cat became contemptuous of him, knowing itself dreaded. That
splendid courage he was born with had faded to an extreme timidity.
Before physical phenomena that pique most children to cunning
endeavour, little Bean was aghast.
And very soon to this burden of fear was added the graver problems of
human association. From being the butt of capricious physical forces he
became a social unit and found this more terrifying than all that had
gone before. At least in the physical world, if you kept pretty still,
didn't touch things, didn't climb, stayed away from edges and windows
and water and cows and looked carefully where you stepped, probably
nothing would hurt you. But these new terrors of the social world lay in
wait for you; clutched you in moments of the most inoffensive
enjoyment.
His mother seemed to be director-general of these monsters, a ruthless
deviser of exquisite tortures. There were unseasonable washings,
dressings, combings and curlings--admonitions to be "a little
gentleman." Loathsomely garbed, he was made to sit stiffly on a chair
in the presence of falsely enthusiastic callers; or he was taken to call on
those same callers and made to sit stiffly again while they, with
feverish affectations of curiosity, asked him what his name was,
something they already knew at least as well as he did; made to
overhear their ensuing declarations that the cat had got his tongue,
which he always denied bitterly until he came to see through the plot
and learned to receive the accusation in stony silence.
Boys of his own age took hold of him roughly and laid him in the dust,
jeeringly threw his hat to some high roof, spat on his new shoes. Even
little girls, divining his abjectness, were prone to act rowdyish with him.
And this especially made him suffer. He comprehended, somehow, that
it was ignoble for a man child to be afraid of little girls.
Money was another source of grief. Not an exciting thing in itself, he
had yet learned that people possessing desirable objects would insanely
part with them for money. Then came one of the Uncle Bunkers from
over Walnut Shade way, who scowled at him when leaving and gave
him a dime. He voiced a wish to exchange this for sweets with a certain

madman in the village who had no understanding of the value of his
stock. His mother demurred; not alone because candy was
unwholesome, but because the only right thing to do with money was
to "save" it. And his mother prevailed, even though his father coarsely
suggested that all the candy he could ever buy with Bunker money
wouldn't hurt him none. The mother said that this was "low," and the
father retorted with equal lowness that a rigid saving of all
Bunker-given money wouldn't make no one a "Croosus," neither, if you
come down to that.
It resulted in his being told that he could play freely with his dime one
whole afternoon before the unexciting process of saving it began. Well
enough, that! He had grown too fearful of life to lose that coin vulgarly
out in the grass, as another would almost surely have done.
But he was beguiled in the mart of the money changers. To him,
standing safely within the front gate where nothing could burn him, fall
upon him, or chase him, "playing" respectfully with his new dime,
came one of slightly superior years and criminal instincts demanding to
inspect the treasure. The privilege was readily accorded, to arouse only
contempt. The piece was too small. The