kissed him, in the rapture of this now old-fashioned music, and he woke
with pangs of heartbreak in the very person of the dreamer.
But he could not make anything either of Byron or Cowper; and he did not
even try to read the little tree-calf volumes of Homer and Virgil which
his father had in the versions of Pope and Dryden; the small
copperplates with which they were illustrated conveyed no suggestion to
him. Afterwards he read Goldsmith's "Deserted Village," and he formed a
great passion for Pope's "Pastorals," which he imitated in their easy
heroics; but till he came to read Longfellow, and Tennyson, and Heine,
he never read any long poem without more fatigue than pleasure. His
father used to say that the taste for poetry was an acquired taste, like
the taste for tomatoes, and that he would come to it yet; but he never
came to it, or so much of it as some people seemed to do, and he always
had his sorrowful misgivings as to whether they liked it as much as they
pretended. I think, too, that it should be a flavor, a spice, a sweet, a
delicate relish in the high banquet of literature, and never a chief
dish; and I should not know how to defend my boy for trying to make long
poems of his own at the very time when he found it so hard to read other
people's long poems.
He had no conception of authorship as a vocation in life, and he did
not know why he wanted to make poetry. After first flaunting his skill
in it before the boys, and getting one of them into trouble by writing a
love-letter for him to a girl at school, and making the girl cry at a
thing so strange and puzzling as a love-letter in rhyme, he preferred to
conceal his gift. It became
"His shame in crowds--his solitary pride,"
and he learned to know that it was considered _soft_ to write poetry, as
indeed it mostly is. He himself regarded with contempt a young man who
had printed a piece of poetry in his father's newspaper and put his own
name to it. He did not know what he would not have done sooner than
print poetry and put his name to it; and he was melted with confusion
when a girl who was going to have a party came to him at the
printing-office and asked him to make her the invitations in verse. The
printers laughed, and it seemed to the boy that he could never get over
it.
But such disgraces are soon lived down, even at ten years, and a great
new experience which now came to him possibly helped the boy to forget.
This was the theatre, which he had sometimes heard his father speak of.
There had once been a theatre in the Boy's Town, when a strolling
company came up from Cincinnati, and opened for a season in an empty
pork-house. But that was a long time ago, and, though he had written a
tragedy, all that the boy knew of a theatre was from a picture in a
Sunday-school book where a stage scene was given to show what kind of
desperate amusements a person might come to in middle life if he began
by breaking the Sabbath in his youth. His brother had once been taken to
a theatre in Pittsburgh by one of their river-going uncles, and he
often told about it; but my boy formed no conception of the beautiful
reality from his accounts of a burglar who jumped from a roof and was
chased by a watchman with a pistol up and down a street with houses
painted on a curtain.
[Illustration: "THE BEACON OF DEATH."]
The company which came to the Boy's Town in his time was again from
Cincinnati, and it was under the management of the father and mother of
two actresses, afterwards famous, who were then children, just starting
upon their career. These pretty little creatures took the leading parts
in "Bombastes Furioso," the first night my boy ever saw a play, and he
instantly fell impartially in love with both of them, and tacitly
remained their abject slave for a great while after. When the smaller of
them came out with a large pair of stage boots in one hand and a drawn
sword in the other, and said,
"Whoever dares these boots displace
Shall meet Bombastes face to face,"
if the boy had not already been bereft of his senses by the melodrama
preceding the burlesque, he must have been transported by her beauty,
her grace, her genius. He, indeed, gave her and her sister his heart,
but his mind was already gone, rapt from him by the adorable pirate who
fought a losing fight with broadswords, two up and two down--click-click,
click-click--and died all over the deck of the pirate ship in the
opening piece. This was called the "Beacon of Death," and the scene
represented the forecastle of the pirate ship with a lantern dangling
from the rigging, to lure unsuspecting merchantmen to their doom.
Afterwards, the boy remembered nothing of the story, but a scrap of the
dialogue meaninglessly remained with him; and when the pirate captain
appeared with his bloody crew and said, hoarsely, "Let us go below and
get some brandy!" the boy would have bartered all his hopes of bliss to
have been that abandoned ruffian. In fact, he always liked, and longed
to be, the villain, rather than any other person in the play, and he so
glutted himself with crime of every sort in his tender years at the
theatre that he afterwards came to be very tired of it, and avoided the
plays and novels that had very marked villains in them.
He was in an ecstasy as soon as the curtain rose that night, and he
lived somewhere out of his body as long as the playing lasted, which was
well on to midnight; for in those days the theatre did not meanly put
the public off with one play, but gave it a heartful and its money's
worth with three. On his first night my boy saw "The Beacon of Death,"
"Bombastes Furioso," and "Black-eyed Susan," and he never afterwards saw
less than three plays each night, and he never missed a night, as long
as the theatre languished in the unfriendly air of that mainly
Calvinistic community, where the theatre was regarded by most good
people as the eighth of the seven deadly sins. The whole day long he
dwelt in a dream of it that blotted out, or rather consumed with more
effulgent brightness, all the other day-dreams he had dreamed before,
and his heart almost burst with longing to be a villain like those
villains on the stage, to have a moustache--a black moustache--such as
they wore at a time when every one off the stage was clean shaven, and
somehow to end bloodily, murderously, as became a villain.
I dare say this was not quite a wholesome frame of mind for a boy of ten
years; but I do not defend it; I only portray it. Being the boy he was,
he was destined somehow to dwell half the time in a world of dreamery;
and I have tried to express how, when he had once got enough of
villainy, he reformed his ideals and rather liked virtue. At any rate,
it was a phase of being that could not have been prevented without
literally destroying him, and I feel pretty sure that his father did
well to let him have his fill of the theatre at once. He could not have
known of the riot of emotions behind the child's shy silence, or how
continually he was employed in dealing death to all the good people in
the pieces he saw or imagined. This the boy could no more have suffered
to appear than his passion for those lovely little girls, for whose sake
he somehow perpetrated these wicked deeds. The theatre bills, large and
small, were printed in his father's office, and sometimes the amiable
manager and his wife strolled in with the copy. The boy always wildly
hoped and feared they would bring the little girls with them, but they
never did, and he contented himself with secretly adoring the father and
mother, doubly divine as their parents and as actors. They were on easy
terms with the roller-boy, the wretch who shot turtle-doves with no
regard for their symbolical character, and they joked with him, in a
light give-and-take that smote my boy with an anguish of envy. It would
have been richly enough for him to pass the least word with them; a
look, a smile from them would have been bliss; but he shrank out of
their way; and once when he met them in the street, and they seemed to
be going to speak to him, he ran so that they could not.
XVI.
OTHER BOYS.
I CANNOT quite understand why the theatre, which my boy was so full of,
and so fond of, did not inspire him to write plays, to pour them out,
tragedy upon tragedy, till the world was filled with tears and blood.
Perhaps it was because his soul was so soaked, and, as it were,
water-logged with the drama, that it could only drift sluggishly in that
welter of emotions, and make for no point, no port, where it could
recover itself and direct its powers again. The historical romance which
he had begun to write before the impassioned days of the theatre seems
to have been lost sight of at this time, though it was an enterprise
that he was so confident of carrying forward that he told all his family
and friends about it, and even put down the opening passages of it on
paper which he cut in large quantity, and ruled himself, so as to have
it exactly suitable. The story, as I have said, was imagined from events
in Irving's history of the "Conquest of Granada," a book which the boy
loved hardly less than the monkish legends of "Gesta Romanorum," and it
concerned the rival fortunes of Hamet el Zegri and Boabdil el Chico, the
uncle and nephew who vied with each other for the crumbling throne of
the Moorish kingdom; but I have not the least notion how it all ended.
Perhaps the boy himself had none.
I wish I could truly say that he finished any of his literary
undertakings, but I cannot. They were so many that they cumbered the
house, and were trodden under foot; and sometimes they brought him to
open shame, as when his brother picked one of them up, and began to read
it out loud with affected admiration. He was apt to be ashamed of his
literary efforts after the first moment, and he shuddered at his
brother's burlesque of the high romantic vein in which most of his
neverended beginnings were conceived. One of his river-faring uncles was
visiting with his family at the boy's home when he laid out the scheme
of his great fiction of "Hamet el Zegri," and the kindly young aunt took
an interest in it which he poorly rewarded a few months later, when she
asked how the story was getting on, and he tried to ignore the whole
matter, and showed such mortification at the mention of it that the poor
lady was quite bewildered.
The trouble with him was, that he had to live that kind of double life I
have spoken of--the Boy's Town life and the Cloud Dweller's life--and
that the last, which he was secretly proud of, abashed him before the
first. This is always the way with double-lived people, but he did not
know it, and he stumbled along through the glory and the ignominy as
best he could, and, as he thought, alone.
He was often kept from being a fool, and worse, by that elder brother of
his; and I advise every boy to have an elder brother. Have a brother
about four years older than yourself, I should say; and if your temper
is hot, and your disposition revengeful, and you are a vain and
ridiculous dreamer at the same time that you are eager to excel in feats
of strength and games of skill, and to do everything that the other
fellows do, and are ashamed to be better than the worst boy in the
crowd, your brother can be of the greatest use to you, with his larger
experience and wisdom. My boy's brother seemed to have an ideal of
usefulness, while my boy only had an ideal of glory, to wish to help
others, while my boy only wished to help himself. My boy would as soon
have thought of his father's doing a wrong thing as of his brother's
doing it; and his brother was a calm light of common-sense, of justice,
of truth, while he was a fantastic flicker of gaudy purposes which he
wished to make shine before men in their fulfilment. His brother was
always doing for him and for the younger children; while my boy only did
for himself; he had a very gray moustache before he began to have any
conception of the fact that he was sent into the world to serve and to
suffer, as well as to rule and enjoy. But his brother seemed to know
this instinctively; he bore the yoke in his youth, patiently if not
willingly; he shared the anxieties as he parted the cares of his father
and mother. Yet he was a boy among boys, too; he loved to swim, to
skate, to fish, to forage, and passionately, above all, he loved to
hunt; but in everything he held himself in check, that he might hold the
younger boys in check; and my boy often repaid his conscientious
vigilance with hard words and hard names, such as embitter even the most
self-forgiving memories. He kept mechanically within certain laws, and
though in his rage he hurled every other name at his brother, he would
not call him a fool, because then he would be in danger of hell-fire. If
he had known just what Raca meant, he might have called him Raca, for he
was not so much afraid of the council; but, as it was, his brother
escaped that insult, and held through all a rein upon him, and governed
him through his scruples as well as his fears.
His brother was full of inventions and enterprises beyond most other
boys, and his undertakings came to the same end of nothingness that
awaits all boyish endeavor. He intended to make fireworks and sell them;
he meant to raise silk-worms; he prepared to take the contract of
clearing the new cemetery grounds of stumps by blasting them out with
gunpowder. Besides this, he had a plan with another big boy for making
money, by getting slabs from the saw-mill, and sawing them up into
stove-wood, and selling them to the cooks of canal-boats. The only
trouble was that the cooks would not buy the fuel, even when the boys
had a half-cord of it all nicely piled up on the canal-bank; they would
rather come ashore after dark and take it for nothing. He had a good
many other schemes for getting rich, that failed; and he wanted to go to
California and dig gold; only his mother would not consent. He really
did save the Canal-Basin once, when the banks began to give way after a
long rain. He saw the break beginning, and ran to tell his father, who
had the firebells rung. The fire companies came rushing to the rescue,
but as they could not put the Basin out with their engines, they all got
shovels and kept it in. They did not do this before it had overflowed
the street, and run into the cellars of the nearest houses. The water
stood two feet deep in the kitchen of my boy's house, and the yard was
flooded so that the boys made rafts and navigated it for a whole day. My
boy's brother got drenched to the skin in the rain, and lots of fellows
fell off the rafts.
He belonged to a military company of big boys that had real wooden guns,
such as the little boys never could get, and silk oil-cloth caps, and
nankeen roundabouts, and white pantaloons with black stripes down the
legs; and once they marched out to a boy's that had a father that had a
farm, and he gave them all a free dinner in an arbor before the house;
bread and butter, and apple-butter, and molasses and pound cake, and
peaches and apples; it was splendid. When the excitement about the
Mexican War was the highest, the company wanted a fort; and they got a
farmer to come and scale off the sod with his plough, in a grassy place
there was near a piece of woods, where a good many cows were pastured.
They took the pieces of sod, and built them up into the walls of a fort
about fifteen feet square; they intended to build them higher than their
heads, but they got so eager to have the works stormed that they could
not wait, and they commenced having the battle when they had the walls
only breast high. There were going to be two parties: one to attack the
fort, and the other to defend it, and they were just going to throw
sods; but one boy had a real shot-gun, that he was to load up with
powder and fire off when the battle got to the worst, so as to have it
more like a battle. He thought it would be more like yet if he put in a
few shot, and he did it on his own hook. It was a splendid gun, but it
would not stand cocked long, and he was resting it on the wall of the
fort, ready to fire when the storming-party came on, throwing sods and
yelling and holloing; and all at once his gun went off, and a cow that
was grazing broadside to the fort gave a frightened bellow, and put up
her tail, and started for home. When they found out that the gun, if
not the boy, had shot a cow, the Mexicans and Americans both took to
their heels; and it was a good thing they did so, for as soon as that
cow got home, and the owner found out by the blood on her that she had
been shot, though it was only a very slight wound, he was so mad that he
did not know what to do, and very likely he would have half killed those
boys if he had caught them. He got a plough, and he went out to their
fort, and he ploughed it all down flat, so that not one sod remained
upon another.
My boy's brother had a good many friends who were too old for my boy to
play with. One of them had a father that had a flour-mill out at the
First Lock, and for a while my boy's brother intended to be a miller. I
do not know why he gave up being one; he did stay up all night with his
friend in the mill once, and he found out that the water has more power
by night than by day, or at least he came to believe so. He knew another
boy who had a father who had a stone-quarry and a canal-boat to bring
the stone to town. It was a scow, and it was drawn by one horse;
sometimes he got to drive the horse, and once he was allowed to steer
the boat. This was a great thing, and it would have been hard to believe
of anybody else. The name of the boy that had the father that owned this
boat was Piccolo; or, rather, that was his nickname, given him because
he could whistle like a piccolo-flute. Once the fellows were disputing
whether you could jump halfway across a narrow stream, and then jump
back, without touching your feet to the other shore. Piccolo tried it,
and sat down in the middle of the stream.
My boy's brother had a scheme for preserving ripe fruit, by sealing it
up in a stone jug and burying the jug in the ground, and not digging it
up till Christmas. He tried it with a jug of cherries, which he dug up
in about a week; but the cherries could not have smelt worse if they had
been kept till Christmas. He knew a boy that had a father that had a
bakery, and that used to let him come and watch them making bread. There
was a fat boy learning the trade there, and they called him the
dough-baby, because he looked so white and soft; and the boy whose
father had a mill said that down at the German brewery they had a Dutch
boy that they were teaching to drink beer, so they could tell how much
beer a person could drink if he was taken early; but perhaps this was
not true.
My boy's brother went to all sorts of places that my boy was too shy to
go to; and he associated with much older boys, but there was one boy
who, as I have said, was the dear friend of both of them, and that was
the boy who came to learn the trade in their father's printing-office,
and who began an historical romance at the time my boy began his great
Moorish novel. The first day he came he was put to roll, or ink the
types, while my boy's brother worked the press, and all day long my boy,
from where he was setting type, could hear him telling the story of a
book he had read. It was about a person named Monte Cristo, who was a
count, and who could do anything. My boy listened with a gnawing
literary jealousy of a boy who had read a book that he had never heard
of. He tried to think whether it sounded as if it were as great a book
as the "Conquest of Granada," or "Gesta Romanorum;" and for a time he
kept aloof from this boy because of his envy. Afterwards they came
together on "Don Quixote," but though my boy came to have quite a
passionate fondness for him, he was long in getting rid of his grudge
against him for his knowledge of "Monte Cristo." He was as great a
laughter as my boy and his brother, and he liked the same sports, so
that two by two, or all three together, they had no end of jokes and
fun. He became the editor of a country newspaper, with varying fortunes
but steadfast principles, and when the war broke out he went as a
private soldier. He soon rose to be an officer, and fought bravely in
many battles. Then he came back to a country-newspaper office where,
ever after, he continued to fight the battles of right against wrong,
till he died not long ago at his post of duty--a true, generous, and
lofty soul. He was one of those boys who grow into the men who seem
commoner in America than elsewhere, and who succeed far beyond our
millionaires and statesmen in realizing the ideal of America in their
nobly simple lives. If his story could be faithfully written out, word
for word, deed for deed, it would be far more thrilling than that of
Monte Cristo, or any hero of romance; and so would the common story of
any common life; but we cannot tell these stories, somehow.
My boy knew nearly a hundred boys, more or less; but it is no use trying
to tell about them, for all boys are a good deal alike, and most of
these did not differ much from the rest. They were pretty good fellows;
that is to say, they never did half the mischief they intended to do,
and they had moments of intending to do right, or at least they thought
they did, and when they did wrong they said they did not intend to. But
my boy never had any particular friend among his schoolmates, though he
played and fought with them on intimate terms, and was a good comrade
with any boy that wanted to go in swimming or out hunting. His closest
friend was a boy who was probably never willingly at school in his life,
and who had no more relish of literature or learning in him than the
open fields, or the warm air of an early spring day. I dare say it was a
sense of his kinship with nature that took my boy with him, and rested
his soul from all its wild dreams and vain imaginings. He was like a
piece of the genial earth, with no more hint of toiling or spinning in
him; willing for anything, but passive, and without force or aim. He
lived in a belated log-cabin that stood in the edge of a corn-field on
the river-bank, and he seemed, one day when my boy went to find him
there, to have a mother, who smoked a cob-pipe, and two or three large
sisters who hulked about in the one dim, low room. But the boys had very
little to do with each other's houses, or, for that matter, with each
other's yards. His friend seldom entered my boy's gate, and never his
door; for with all the toleration his father felt for every manner of
human creature, he could not see what good the boy was to get from this
queer companion. It is certain that, he got no harm; for his companion
was too vague and void even to think evil. Socially, he was as low as
the ground under foot, but morally he was as good as any boy in the
Boy's Town, and he had no bad impulses. He had no impulses at all, in
fact, and of his own motion he never did anything, or seemed to think
anything. When he wished to get at my boy, he simply appeared in the
neighborhood, and hung about the outside of the fence till he came out.
He did not whistle, or call "E-oo-we!" as the other fellows did, but
waited patiently to be discovered, and to be gone off with wherever my
boy listed. He never had any plans himself, and never any will but to
go in swimming; he neither hunted nor foraged; he did not even fish; and
I suppose that money could not have hired him to run races. He played
marbles, but not very well, and he did not care much for the game. The
two boys soaked themselves in the river together, and then they lay on
the sandy shore, or under some tree, and talked; but my boy could not
have talked to him about any of the things that were in his books, or
the fume of dreams they sent up in his mind. He must rather have soothed
against his soft, caressing ignorance the ache of his fantastic spirit,
and reposed his intensity of purpose in that lax and easy aimlessness.
Their friendship was not only more innocent than any other friendship my
boy had, but it was wholly innocent; they loved each other, and that was
all; and why people love one another there is never any satisfactory
telling. But this friend of his must have had great natural good in him;
and if I could find a man of the make of that boy I am sure I should
love him.