story of one of them come home; and Piggy thought with inward
trembling that he would rather report even a whipping at home than
face his mother in the dishonor which covered him. At supper Mrs.
Pennington repeated the legend of the note with great solemnity. When
her husband showed signs of laughing, she glared at him. Her son ate
rapidly in silence. Over his mother's shoulders Piggy saw the hired
girl giggle. The only reply that Mrs. Pennington could get to her
questions was, "Aw, that ain't nothin'," or "Aw, gee whiz, ma, you
must think that's somethin'." But she proclaimed, in the presence of
the father, the son, and the hired girl, that if she ever caught a
boy of hers getting "girl-struck" she would "show him," which, being
translated, means much that no dignified young gentleman likes to
contemplate. But when the son was out of hearing, Mrs. Pennington told
her husband, in the repressed tone which she used when expressing her
diplomatic communications, that he would have "to take that boy in
hand." Whereupon the father leaned back in his chair and laughed,
laughed until he grew red in the face, laughed till the pans in the
kitchen rattled, laughed--to use the words of his wife in closing the
incident--"like a natural born simpleton."
[Illustration: _Her son ate rapidly in silence_.]
[Illustration: _Over his mother's shoulders Piggy saw the hired girl
giggle_.]
Alas for Piggy Pennington--he might affect great pride in his amours
when the hired girl teased him; he might put on a brave face and even
lure himself into the belief that this arch tormentor saw him only as
a gay deceiver; but when the lights were out, Piggy covered his head
with the bedclothes, and grew hot and cold by turns, till sleep came
and bore him away from his humiliation.
All day Saturday, before the Bud Perkins' surprise party, Piggy
Pennington and Mealy Jones were inseparable. And Piggy, who was King
of Boyville, came down from his throne and walked humbly beside Mealy,
the least of all his courtiers. In fact, since the reading of his
note Piggy had become needlessly deferential and considerate of the
feelings of his rival.
If the two entered a crowd and played "foot and a half" or "slap and
a kick" or "leap-frog," and if Mealy was "it"--and poor Mealy was
generally "it" in any game--Piggy did not jump viciously on Mealy's
wobbly back, nor did he slap hard, nor kick hard, as he would have
slapped and kicked on other days, before he descended from his throne
to dwell with the beasts of the field on that fatal Friday. Pride kept
Mealy on the rack.
Time and again his little, freckled, milky face hit the moist springy
ground as Bud or Abe or Jim bumped into him at their play. He was glad
when the day ended and he could go home. For Mealy Jones abhorred the
dirt that begrimed his face and soiled his white starched collar. He
liked to play in lukewarm water, to slosh in the suds, and to rub
his soft little hands whiter and whiter in the foam. His cleanliness
pleased his mother, and she boasted of it to the mothers of other
boys--mothers of boys with high-water marks just above their shirt
collars; of boys who had to be yanked back to the roller-towel after
washing to have their ears rubbed; of bad, bad, bad boys who washed
their feet in the dew of the grass at night and told their mothers
that they had washed them in the tub at the pump; of wicked and sinful
boys who killed toads and cried noisily when their warts bled in the
hot water; in fact, to the mothers of nearly all the boys in Boyville.
And thus it came about that Boyville having Mealy Jones set before it
as a model child, contracted a cordial hate for him, and rose against
him when he presumed to contest with Piggy for his Heart's Desire. Yet
all Boyville loved a fight, and all Boyville goaded the King to wrath,
teased him, bantered him, and even pretended to doubt his worth.
Therefore, when Piggy Pennington, the King of Boyville, dressed for
the party that night in his Sunday clothes and his Sunday shoes and
limped down the sidewalk to the Jones's, where the boys and girls were
to meet before descending upon Bud Perkins, there was rancor in the
royal heart and maternal hair-oil on the royal head. But a strange
throb of glad pain in the pit of the royal stomach came at the thought
of the two bright eyes that would soon meet his own. The eyes made him
forget his blistering shoes, and a smile at the door divested his mind
of the serrated collar upon which his head had been pivoting for five
distracted minutes. The last thing of all to go was his pride in the
hair-oil, but it fell before a voice that said: "Well, you got here,
did you?"
[Illustration: _His cleanliness pleased his mother and she boasted of
it to the mothers of other boys_.]
That was all. But it was enough to make Piggy Pennington feel the core
of a music-box turning inside him, while outside the company saw the
King of Boyville transformed into a very red and very sweaty youth
holding madly to the back of his cuffs and chuckling deliriously. In a
daze he took off his hat, and put a sack of oranges, his part in the
evening's refreshment, on a table in the next room. When he regained
consciousness, Piggy noticed that Mealy Jones, who had pranced into
the room with much unction, was sitting next to his Heart's Desire.
The children were making merry chatter. Piggy took his place on the
end of a lounge, and turning his back to the guilty pair, gave an
"injin" pinch to Jimmy Sears, with orders to "pass it on."
Indeed, so unconcerned was Piggy in the progress of the affair behind
him that he began to shove the line of the boys on the lounge; the
shoving grew into a scuffle, and the scuffle into a wrestle, which
ended on the front porch. At length Piggy stalked through the room
where the girls were sitting, saying, when he returned with his
oranges and his hat: "Come on, fellers, everybody's here."
The boys on the porch followed Piggy's example, and in a minute or two
they stood huddled at the gate calling at the girls in the house to
hurry. When the girls were on the porch, the boys struck out, and the
two groups, a respectful distance apart, walked through the town.
Mealy Jones was enjoying the triumph of his life, walking proudly
between the noisy boys and giggling girls, beside--but why linger over
the details of this instance of man's duplicity and woman's worse than
weakness!
The young blades of the Court of Boyville waited politely at the gate
before the house where Bud Perkins lived with Miss Morgan, his foster
mother. When the maidens arrived, all the company went trooping up
Miss Morgan's steps. After Piggy had chased Bud from the front door
into a closet, from which the host fought his way gallantly into
the middle of the parlor floor, the essential preliminaries of the
evening's entertainment were over. A little later the games began.
First, there was "forfeits." Then came "tin-tin." "Clap in and clap
out" followed, and finally, after much protestation from the girls,
but at the earnest solicitation of Mealy Jones, "post-office" started.
Piggy did not urge, nor protest. He had gone through the games
listlessly, occasionally breaking into a spasm of gayety that was
clearly hollow, and afterwards sinking into profound indifference. For
how could a well-conditioned boy be gay with a heartache under his
Sunday shirt and the spectacle before his eyes of a freckled human
cock-sparrow darting round and round the bower of his Heart's Desire?
Under such circumstances it was clearly impossible for him to see the
eyes that sought his in vain across the turmoil of the room. Indeed, a
voice pitched a trifle high to carry well spoke for him to hear, but
met deaf ears. A little maid in a black-and-red check which the King
of Boyville once preferred to royal purple, even made her way across
the throng--undesignedly, he thought, but Piggy basked in the joy of
her presence and made no sign to show his pleasure. A little later, in
the shuffle of the game, Piggy and his Heart's Desire were far apart.
Half an hour passed, but still he did not revive. Mealy Jones called
her out in "post-office," and Piggy thought he saw her smile. That was
too much. When the dining-room door closed behind the black-and-red
checked dress, the pitcher that enclosed his woe broke and the wheel
at the cistern of his endurance stopped. Mealy Jones came into the
room, and the boy who kept the "post-office" called out, "Piggy
Pennington." But the slam of the front door was his answer.
[Illustration: _A little maid in a black-and-red check_.]
Piggy sat on the front porch, and reviewed the entire affair. It began
when his Heart's Desire had fluttered into his autograph album with a
coy:
"When this you see
Remember me."
[Illustration: _Piggy sat on the front porch, and reviewed the entire
affair_.]
[Illustration: _It began when his Heart's Desire had fluttered into
his autograph album_.]
He followed the corrugated course of true love, step by step up to its
climax, where, a week before, she had given him his choice of her new
pack of assorted visiting-cards. He rose at the end of five minutes'
sombre meditation, holding the curling gelatine card of his choice
in his warm hand. After venting a heavy sigh, he checked a motion to
throw away the token of his undoing and put it back into his pocket.
While he was plotting dark things against the life and happiness of
Mealy Jones, Piggy heard the sound of the merriment within, and a
mischievous smile spread over his angry countenance. He tiptoed to the
window, and peeped in. He saw his Heart's Desire sitting alone. He
cheered up a little, not much--but sufficiently to reach in his pocket
for his tick-tack.
Now, it may be clearly proved, if necessary, that the tick-tack was
invented by the devil. Any wise man's son knows that every boy between
the ages of ten and fourteen carries with him at all times a complete
outfit of the mechanical devices on which the devil holds the patent
and demands a royalty. So there is nothing really strange in the
statement that Piggy Pennington took from his Sunday clothes,
beneath a pocketful of Rewards of Merit for regular attendance at
Sunday-school--all dated before the Christmas-tree--a spool with
notched wheels, a lead pencil, and a bit of fishline. The line wound
round the spool. Piggy put the pencil through the hole in the
spool, and held the notched rims of the spool against the window
pane by pressing on the pencil axle. He gave the cord a quick jerk; a
rattle, a wail, and a shriek were successively produced by the notches
whirring on the glass. The company within doors screamed. Everyone
knew it was Piggy, but no one ever lived with nerves strong enough to
withstand the shock of a tick-tack. At the first shock those in-doors
decided to ignore the disturbance. But it occurred twice afterwards,
and a third tick-tack at a party is a dare. So the boys took it up. As
Piggy ran he forgot his hot, heavy shoes; he felt the night wind on
his face and in his hair. He cared nothing for his pursuers; he ran
for the gladness that came with running. Now he slackened his pace
and let the boys catch up with him, and again he spread the mocking
distance between them. He turned down an alley, and eluded the pack.
All the youngsters at the party, even the girls, had scampered out of
the house to watch the race. When Piggy vaulted the back-yard fence
into Miss Morgan's garden, he heard the pursuers half a block away. He
saw, a hundred feet distant, a bevy of girls standing on the sidewalk.
And he saw, too, as he came skipping down the lot, something that made
him fairly skim over the earth; his Heart's Desire, standing alone,
near the porch, in his path, under an apple-tree. The exhilaration of
the chase had made him forget his trouble. He was so surefooted in the
race that he forgot to be abashed for the moment and came bounding
down by the apple-tree. He was full of pride. When he stopped he
was the King of Boyville and every inch a king. The king--not
Piggy--should be blamed. It was all over in a second--almost before he
had stopped. He aimed at her cheek, but he got her ear. That was the
first that he knew of it. Piggy seemed to return to life then. In
his confusion he felt himself shrivelling up to his normal
size--shrivelling and frying. In an instant he was gone, and Piggy
Pennington ran into the group of girls on the sidewalk and let them
catch him and hold him. The breathless youths went into the house
telling their adventures in the race between gasps. But Piggy did not
dare to look at his Heart's Desire for as much as five minutes--a
long, long time. No one had seen him beneath the apple-tree. He was
not afraid of the teasing, but he was afraid of a withering look from
his Heart's Desire,--a look that he felt with a parching fear in his
throat would throw the universe into an eclipse for him. He observed
that she got up and changed her seat to be rid of Mealy Jones. At
first Piggy thought that was a good sign, but a moment later he
reasoned that the avoidance of Mealy was inspired probably by a
loathing for all boys. He dared not seek her eyes, but he mingled
noisily in the crowd for a while, and then, on a desperate venture,
carelessly snapped a peanut shell and hit his Heart's Desire on
the chin. He seemed to be looking a thousand miles away in another
direction than that which the missile took. He waited nearly a
minute--a long, uncertain minute--for a response.
Then the shell came back; it did not hit him--but it might have done
so--that was all he could ask. He snapped shells slyly for a quarter
of an hour, and was happy. Once he looked--not exactly looked; perhaps
peeked is the better word; took just the tiniest lightning peek out of
the tail of his eye, and found a smile waiting for him. At supper, if
any one save Piggy had tried to take a chair by his Heart's Desire
when the plates came around, there would have been a fight. Mealy
Jones knew this, and he knew what Piggy did not know, that it would
have been a fight of two against one. So Piggy sat bolt upright in his
chair beside the black-and-red checked dress, and talked to the room
at large; but he spoke no word to the maiden at his side. She noticed
that Piggy kept dropping his knife, and the solicitude of her sex
prompted her to ask: "Are your hands cold, Winfield?"
And the instinct of his sex to hide a fault with a falsehood made
Piggy nod his head.
Then she answered: "Cold hands, a warm heart!"
At this important bit of repartee, the King of Boyville so forgot his
royal dignity that he let an orange-peel drive at Jimmy Sears, and
pretended not to hear her. His only reply was to joggle her arm when
she reached for the cake. Piggy was so exuberant and in such high
spirits that he put his plate on his chair and made Bud Perkins walk
turkey fashion three times around the room. He forgot the disgrace
which his note had brought to him in the school; he forgot the
pretensions of Mealy Jones; he did not wish to forget the episode of
the apple-tree, and for the time Piggy Pennington lived in a most
peculiar world, made of hazel eyes and red-ribboned pig-tails, all
circling around on a background of black-and-red checked flannel.
[Illustration: _At this important bit of repartee_.]
After that nothing mattered very much. It didn't matter that Piggy's
bruised feet began to sting like fire. It didn't matter much if Mealy
Jones's mother did come for him with a lantern and break up the party.
It didn't matter if Jimmy Sears did call out, "Hello, Roses Red," when
the boys reached the bed-room where their hats were; for a voice that
Piggy knew cried back from the adjoining room, "You think you're cute,
don't you, old smarty?" Nothing in the world could matter then, for
had not Piggy Pennington five minutes before handed a card to his
Heart's Desire which read:
_If I may not C U home
may I not sit on the fence
and C U go by_?
And had not she taken it, and said merrily, "I'm going to keep this"?
What could matter after that open avowal?
And so it came to pass in a little while that the courtly company,
headed by the King of Boyville, filed gayly down the path. They walked
two by two, and they started on a long, uneven way. But the King of
Boyville was full of joy--a kind of joy so strange that wise men may
not measure it; a joy so rare that even kings are proud of it.
JAMES SEARS: A NAUGHTY PERSON
LITTLE SISTER'S LULLABY
Zhere, zhere, 'ittul b'o', sistuh 'll wock you to s'eep
Hush-a-bye O, darlene, wock-a-bye, b'o',
An' tell you the stowy about the b'ack sheep--
Wock-a-bye, my 'ittul b'over.
A boy onct said "b'ack sheep, you dot any wool?"
"Uh-huhm," said the lambie, "I dot free bags full."
An' where Murry went w'y the lamb's sure to doe,
They's mowe of zis stowy--I dess I don' know;
But hush-a-bye O, darlene, wock-a-bye b'o',
Wock-a-bye, my 'ittul b'over.
O, mama says buddy tomed stwaight down from Dod;
Hush-a-bye O, uh-huhm, wock-a-bye b'o',
At doctuh mans bwunged him, now is n't zhat odd--
Wock-a-bye, my 'ittul b'over.
For papa says, "doctuhs is thiefs so zhey be."
An' thiefs tain't det up into Heaven you see:
I dess w'en one comes up an' dets sent below,
He's dot to bwing wif him a baby or so;
Hush-a-bye O, uh-huhm, wock-a-bye b'o',
Wock-a-bye, my 'ittul b'over.
But sistuh loves b'o' anyhow if he's dood,
Hush-a-bye O, sweetie, wock-a-bye b'o',
Better 'n tandy er infalid's food--
Wock-a-bye, sistuh's own b'over.
An' some day when buddy drows up to a man,
W'y sistuh an' him 'ull 'ist harness ol' Fan,
An dwive off to Heaven the fuist zhing you know,
An' bwing ever' baby back what wants to doe.
Zhen hush-a-bye O, sweetie, wock-a-bye b'o',
Wock-a-bye, sistuh's own b'over.
James Sears: A Naughty Person
A naughty person ... walketh with a forward mouth.
He winketh with his eyes, he speaketh with his feet, he teacheth with
his fingers;... he deviseth mischief continually;...
Therefore shall his calamity come suddenly; suddenly shall he be
broken without remedy.--_Proverbs_, vi. 12-15.
It was morning--the cool of the morning. The pigeons were gossiping
under the barn eaves. In the apple-tree a robin's song thrilled
at intervals, and the jays were chattering incessantly in the
cherry-trees by the fence. The dew was still on the grass that lay in
the parallelogram of shade made by the Sears' dwelling, and in
the twilight of grass-land all the elf-people were whispering and
tittering and scampering about in surreptitious revel. The breeze
of dawn, tired and worn out, was sinking to a fitful doze in the
cottonwood foliage near by. In the lattice of the kitchen porch two
butterflies were chasing the sun flecks in and out among the branches
of the climbing rose. Even the humble burdock weeds and sunflowers
lining the path that led to the gate seemed to be exalted by the
breath of the morning air, and not out of harmony with the fine, high
chord of ecstasy that was stirring the soul of things. And yet in that
hour, James Sears, with a green-checked gingham apron tied about his
neck, stood near a rain-barrel, bobbing up and down on a churn-handle.
His back ached, and his heart was full of bitterness at the scheme of
creation. For it was Saturday morning--his by every law, precedent, or
tradition known or reported in the Court of Boyville. But instead
of inhaling the joys of the new day, James, whose Courtly name was
"Jimmie," looked for yellow granules on the dasher, and promised God
if He would let him grow up that his little boy should never have to
churn.
[Illustration: _His heart was full of bitterness_.]
Any boy knows that it is a degrading thing to churn, and he further
knows that to wear a green-checked gingham apron is odious beyond
description; however, if the disgusting thing is tied under a boy's
arms, from whence it may be slipped down over the hips and the knees
to the ground, by a certain familiar twist of the body, the case is
not absolutely hopeless. But Jimmy Sears's apron strings were tied
about his neck; so his despair was black and abysmal. Once in a while
Jimmy's bosom became too heavily freighted, and he paused to sigh.
He cheered himself up on these occasions by slyly licking the
churn-dasher; but the good cheer on the dasher was a stimulant that
left him more miserable than it found him. Ever and anon from some
remote chamber in the house behind him came the faint, gasping cry of
a day-old baby. That cry drowned the cooing of the doves, the song of
the robin, and the chirping of the dwellers in the grass; to Jimmy the
bleat of the little human lamb sounded like the roar of a lion. He
could endure penal servitude on his Saturday, with a patience born of
something approaching a philosophy; he could wear a checked gingham
apron, even as a saint wears an unbecoming halo; but the arrival of
the new baby--the fifth addition to the family in the short period of
years covered by Jimmy Sears's memory--brought a bitter pill of wrath
and dropped it in the youth's brimful cup of woe. As the minutes
dragged wearily along, Jimmy Sears reviewed the story of his thraldom.
He thought of how, in his short-dress days, he had been put to rocking
a cradle; how in his kilted days, there had been ever a baby's calico
dress to consider; how, from his earliest fishing-days, there had been
always a tot tagging after him, throwing sticks and stones in
the water to scare the fish; and how, now in his swimming and
cave-dwelling days, there was a swarm of tow-headed Searses, a
crawler, a creeper, a toddler, a stumbler, and a sneaker to run away
from.
[Illustration: _Throwing sticks in the water to scare the fish_.]
[Illustration:
_A crawler,
A creeper,
A toddler,
A stumbler,
and
A sneaker_.]
As the churn-dasher grew heavier, the wrath in Jimmy's cup began to
sputter, dissolving into that which in his older sister's heart would
have been tears; in Jimmy's heart, it took the form of convulsive
sniffling. The boy could hear his sister clattering the breakfast
dishes in the kitchen. The thing that ground upon his heart was the
firm footfall of Mrs. Jones, a neighbor woman, who was overseeing
the affairs of the household. Jimmy could not remember hearing that
footstep except in times of what seemed to him to be the family's
disgrace. He hated Mrs. Jones because she tried to cool his ire by
describing the superior points of the particular new baby that had
arrived each time she came upon her errands of neighborly mercy. Just
as the yellow granules began to appear in the buttermilk pool on the
churn-top, Jimmy heard a step on the gravel walk behind him. The step
came nearer; when Jimmy lifted his eyes, they glared into the face of
Harold Jones. Choler cooled into surprise, and surprise exploded into
a vapid, grinning "Huh!" which was followed by another "Huh!" that
gurgled out into a real laugh as Jimmy greeted the visitor. The Jones
boy giggled, and Jimmy found his tongue and asked: "Did you ever
churn?" When Harold admitted that he, too, was a slave of the
churn, the freemasonry of Boyville was established. A moment later
Mealy--Harold's title in the Court--was exemplifying the work. When
Mrs. Jones came out of the house to take care of the butter, she saw
her son and Jimmy lying on the grass. Half an hour later the boys in
the barn heard Mrs. Jones's voice calling,--
[Illustration: _Mrs. Jones came out to take care of the butter_.]
"Harold, O Harold, don't you want to come and look at the baby?" Now
James Sears in the twenty-four hours of his new sister's life had not
let the fact of her existence form expression on his lips. Much
less had he lowered his hostile flag to salute her; but he knew
instinctively that Harold Jones was the sort of a boy who would unsex
himself by looking at a baby. When Mealy answered, "Yes'm," and
trotted down the back-yard path to the kitchen, Jimmy Sears scorned
him heartily enough to fancy Mealy in the act of holding the loathsome
thing in his arms. Further contumely was beyond Jimmy's imagination.
[Illustration: _The sort of boy who would unsex himself by looking at
a baby_.]
[Illustration: _James_.]
When Mealy Jones came back, the barn wherein he had left Jimmy was
empty; and only when Mealy had started homeward, and a clod came
whizzing down the alley, hitting him under the ear, did Mealy know how
Jimmy Sears resented an insult. Mealy looked around; no one was in
sight.