“I know I did,” he said. “How could I! What would Dearest say if she heard me use such a horrid word! But He makes me do it! It’s His terrible influence. Oh, if I were not the sweetest, most forgiving little soul anybody ever heard of, I could hate Him!”

To emphasize the general grief the big dog, Dougal, set up a melancholy howling, and lashed the piano keys with his great tail.

It was here that Professor Einstein intervened. “My boy,” he said, “if you expect us to understand you, do not begin your story in the middle and wriggle out toward both ends. I recommend the Scientific Method: state your principal thesis, develop it, and work toward a conclusion.”

Little Lord Fauntleroy took his hands from his face and looked at the great man with adoration.

“Just what I wanted,” said he; “you are so wise, Professor Einstein, I knew you could help me. I shall do as you say. Please, may I sit on your knee?”

Einstein pondered for a moment, then said, “No.” My respect for his wisdom rose sharply. “Just stand where you are, and I shall sit down, and you shall tell us both, quietly and clearly, what the trouble is! Now, first of all, where do you come from?”

“From Paradise,” said the Miraculous Child. “Oh, it’s not at all the way silly people imagine. It’s really a huge confederation of self-governing Paradises where everybody can enjoy Eternity with the sort of people they like best. There aren’t any grown-ups in the Children’s Paradise, or else it wouldn’t be a Paradise for children. And of course the fact that we’re all in the Children’s Paradise makes the other paradises paradisal for the grown-ups.”

“Quite true,” said Einstein. “I cannot recall ever having seen, or heard, a child since I entered the Physics Division of the Intellectuals’ Paradise.”

I was troubled by a doubt. “One moment,” I said. “It has always been my understanding that Paradise is for the living who have passed into rest. But you, my lord, never lived. Explain yourself.”

“Oh, you dear old silly-billy,” said Fauntleroy, putting his graceful little hand on my sleeve, as Dougal smeared my trousers with phantom drool. “You, an author, of a sort, to say such a thing! You know jolly well that I lived more fully and gloriously than the ordinary run of children. I was loved by millions of people who had no children of their own. We children of literature are the aristocracy of the Children’s Paradise. We are remembered for generations, when the real children who didn’t have the luck to live to maturity are forgotten, poor little mites! We set the tone of the place. In a quiet way, we run it! There are the Dickens Group—Little Paul Dombey, and Tiny Tim, and Little Nell—and there are the Outdoors Types—Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and Midshipman Easy, and Jackanapes, and Penrod and lots of others—and there are the littlest ones like the Bobbsey Twins and Budge and Toddy—and there are the Fairy Tale Gang—Rose Red and Snow White, and Jack the Giant Killer and all those. You wouldn’t believe what a lot there are, and we are all so much more vivid than the flesh-and-blood children that we naturally take the lead. Or we did,” said the boy, his beautiful countenance darkening, “until He came.”

“A rival?” I said.

“Not a rival,” said the boy with what in a lesser child might have been taken for a pout, “a usurper.”

“Same thing,” said I. “Let’s hear about it.”

“Everything in the Children’s Paradise was paradisal,” said Fauntleroy, “so long as I was the boss. I took care that everybody was happy; I wouldn’t tolerate an instant’s discord. If any of my agents reported anything to me—”

“Agents?” said Professor Einstein; “Spies, do you mean?”

“Don’t be horrid,” said Fauntleroy, smiling his reproach. “Just children who were either naturally very sharp, like the Artful Dodger, and Gavroche out of Les Miserables, or else children who were abnormally trustworthy like Casabianca—you know, the Boy Who Stood on the Burning Deck. If they saw any trouble brewing they tipped me off, and I dealt with it at once, and if the child didn’t see things differently then, Dougal had a little romp with it, and that always worked.”

Dougal gave a sudden lurch that almost knocked me off my chair, and I saw what a romp might involve.

“Let’s hear about the usurper,” I said.

“You know how things have been on earth for the past twenty years,” said Fauntleroy. “Turbulence everywhere, among nations, among university students, and even among children. In fact, the modern child has simply been going straight to—”

Here he blushed deeply, and whispered something in Professor Einstein’s ear.

“And the usurper came from Hell?” said Professor Einstein.

“No, from Toronto,” said Fauntleroy. “His name is Gold-Tooth Flanagan. He is very proud of his gold tooth. He got it by ripping off Old Age Pensioners in supermarkets until he had enough money to buy it. It was his mark of authority. It is a huge adult-size gold tooth, in the worst possible taste. But of course that sort of life can have but one end: Gold-Tooth was knocked on the head with a bottle in a police raid in Cabbage Town and to his surprise he was sent to the Children’s Paradise. Of course he wanted to go to the Hooligans’ Paradise, but he was too young, so he came to us instead. Nobody’s fault but his own; he peaked too soon.”

“And he tried to take over the Children’s Paradise?” said I.

“From the beginning,” said Fauntleroy. “He said very offensive things. He started by picking on a literary child from the Third World, whom we have always known as Little Black Sambo; Gold Tooth called him a horrid racist name, and when I rebuked him—gently, of course, for he was new, and didn’t know our ways—he asked me if I was gay. I said of course I was, and that Dearest had always loved me for being so gay, and he laughed offensively and mimicked me rudely. It wasn’t until Holden Caulfield told me what ‘gay’ means to minds like Flanagan’s that I understood that I had been insulted. Gay, indeed! Me! As if for years I hadn’t been on a footing of special intimacy with Little Miss Muffet!”

“Didn’t it occur to you to put Dougal on him?” said I.

“I was coming to that, just when the real trouble blew up,” said Fauntleroy. “Of course Flanagan sat in on our meetings where we discussed the nature of the Child’s Bill of Rights; they were fully democratic, so he couldn’t be left out. We were trying to hammer out something along the lines I have already mentioned to you. You see, at United Nations and UNESCO all the children’s business is done by adults, who have no idea of what a sensible child wants; the last thing we want is any kind of independence—make us independent and we have lost all our power. To deal as we think best with adults we must be entirely under their thumbs, which is the same thing as being on their backs: our weakness is our strength, every child knows that.”

“This child is wise beyond his years,” said Einstein.

“Indeed I am,” said Little Lord Fauntleroy. “But Gold-Tooth Flanagan simply didn’t know his business as a child. He was agitating for a Bill of Rights that would allow children to vote at the age of three, and get liquor and dope, and sue their parents for failure to bring them up properly, and ensure that when couples divorced all the assets were placed in the hands of their children—such crazy stuff as you never heard of, that would have robbed children of all their real power and loaded them down with a lot of hard work and financial responsibility. So it came to a showdown.”

“Don’t tell me Gold-Tooth Flanagan won!” said I.

“For the present it is a draw,” said Fauntleroy. “You see, the meeting became more and more unruly, and finally Gold-Tooth called Christopher Robin a Mother. At first I didn’t think anything of that, because to me a mother means Dearest, but a Greek boy out of Aesop’s Fables was sitting on the platform near me and he whispered that it was a very offensive expression, and meant somebody called Oedipus, so I asked Gold-Tooth to explain himself, and to the horror of everybody he did. Christopher Robin cried, and Alice from Wonderland hit Gold-Tooth with a croquet mallet, and when order was restored I had to speak very sharply to Gold-Tooth and he challenged me to a fight. I said I would fight him if Dougal were allowed to be the referee, but he wouldn’t have that, and it looked for a moment as if things were going to be very uneven, until Huck Finn slipped something into my right hand which he said would help, and I very cleverly hit Gold-Tooth when he wasn’t looking, and he fell down. But he jumped right up again and shouted Foul, and when I looked at my hand I saw that Huck had put a horseshoe in it. Then Gold-Tooth attacked me unfairly and without warning, and fought in a way that was utterly un-American, and even un-English, and when it was all over—my authority was gone.”