"Lift Up Your Head . . ."

The young mother gazed at her first baby, less than an hour old. She had borne a beautiful child, she thought, with clear features and deep blue eyes. "Doesn't she look very wise for her age?" she said to her Chinese nurse. "She does indeed," said the smiling nurse. "And she is beautiful too. There is a special purpose for this child."

Pearl Buck, the young mother, was never to forget those words, spoken 30 years ago. But the joy with which she welcomed her baby soon turned to sorrow. The little girl's body was sound and strong; her mind was doomed to remain forever imprisoned in childhood.

Nevertheless, through her mother she has indeed been able to serve a "special purpose." In a simple and moving little book called The Child Who Never Grew (John Day; $1), Author Pearl Buck has told her story; other parents in like case may find help and comfort from it.

New Anxiety. It was not until the child was three that Pearl Buck, then living in China, first grew uneasy about her. Her daughter could not yet talk. "I remember," writes Pearl Buck, "asking friends about their children, and voicing my new anxiety . . . Their replies were comforting, too comforting . . . They spoke all the empty words of assurance that friends, meaning well, will use, and I believed them."

But she could not believe for long. The danger signs were all there--"the slowness to walk, the slowness to talk, and then, when the child could walk, the incessant restlessness which took the form of constantly running hither and thither . . ."

The child was still pink-cheeked and healthy, but her "span of attention was very short . . . Much of her fleet light running had no purpose--it was merely motion. Her eyes, so pure in their blue, were blank when one gazed into their depths. They did not hold or respond. They were changeless . . ."

One day Pearl Buck called in a doctor; next day she called in more. "Then began that long journey which parents of such children know so well . . . We take our children over the surface of the whole earth, seeking the one who can heal. We spend all the money we have and we borrow until there is no one else to lend. We go to doctors good and bad, to anyone, for only a wisp of hope . . ."

Hesitant Words. "So I came and went, too, over the surface of the earth, gradually losing hope and yet never quite losing it, for no doctor said firmly that the child could never be healed. There were alway, the last hesitant words, 'I don't want to say it is hopeless,' and so I kept hoping in the way parents have."

As time passed, the journeys became even harder. For when the child was small, if she stopped in the street to clap her hands, or "if, without reason, she began to dance," passersby did not think it odd. Later, they stared. "The kid is nuts," Pearl Buck once heard a woman say. "From that day I began to shield my child."

It was harder to shield herself. "I did my work . . . But none of it meant anything . . . The hours when I really lived were when I was alone with my child . , I could let sorrow have its way . . When she wept," her child would only stare and laugh, and "it was this uncomprehending laughter which always and finally crushed my heart."

What Shall We Do? Pearl Buck came to know other parents traveling the same road. "Now my eyes can find in any crowd the child like mine. I see him first of all and then I see the mother, trying to smile, trying to speak to the child gaily, her gaiety a screen to hide him from others." Those mothers' cries were always the same: "The schools won't take our children. The neighbors don't want them around. The other children are mean to them . . . What shall we do? It's not a crime to have a child like ours."

It took Pearl Buck herself many years to decide what she must do, and even how she must think, about her child. She knew that since she could find no cure, she must find a school where her child would have other children around, and where she would always be able to live, even after her mother died.

Thus began a new journey, not from doctor to doctor, but from institution to institution. One school she visited she thought would do, until she found that the headmistress was a woman who did not love her charges ("I have to make my living," she said). At another school, she saw children sitting dully, on rows of benches, waiting for hours on end ("We get them all up a couple of times a day and make them walk around the building," said an attendant).

At another school, the children wore "baglike garments of rough calico or burlap. Their food was given to them on the floor and they snatched it up ... The beds were pallets on the floor, and filthy . . . Worst of all to me was that there was not one thing of beauty anywhere, nothing for the children to look at, no reason for them to lift their heads or put out their hands."

Finally, Pearl Buck did find a school--the Training School at Vineland, NJ. (TIME, Jan. 23)--run by kindly, gentle-voiced Edward R. Johnstone, whom the children, some in their 505, called Uncle Ed. In its offices and cottages was hung Vineland's motto: "Happiness first and all else follows." Pearl Buck decided to leave her daughter there.

Strange Comfort. Since then, her child's perpetual childhood has become happy, and Pearl Buck herself has found "a strange comfort in her happiness. As I watched her at play ... it came to me that this child would pass through life as the angels live in Heaven. The difficulties of existence would never be hers . . . She has been able to enjoy sunshine and rain, she loves to skate and ride a tricycle, she finds pleasure in dolls and toy dishes and a sand pile . . . Above all is her never-failing joy in music. She finds her calm and resource in listening, hour after hour, to her records. The gift that is hidden in her shows itself in the still ecstasy with which she listens to the great symphonies, her lips smiling, her eyes gazing off into what distance I do not know . . .

"I put this down because it is one of the compensations, and parents of other children like her ought to know that there are such compensations. These little children find their joys. I know one little boy--I say 'little,' and yet he is a grown man in body--who gets creative pleasure from his collection of brightly colored rags. He sorts them over and over again, rejoicing in their hues and textures . . . The parent learns to be grateful that pleasure finds its expression, if not in ways that benefit the world, at least in ways that satisfy and enrich the child."

Nor are these childish lives a waste. Since they learn as normal people do, though far more slowly, psychologists "have been able to discover, exactly as though in a slow-motion picture, the way the human creature acquires new knowledge and new habits. Our educational techniques for normal children have been vastly improved by what the retarded children have taught us . . ."

Thus, says Pearl Buck, these children have indeed their "special purpose," and parents need not despair, or turn away in shame. "Be proud of your child, accept him as he is and do not heed the words and stares of those who know no better. This child has a meaning for you and for all children . . . Lift up your head and go your appointed way."

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