PENROD
By Booth Tarkington
To
John, Donald And Booth Jameson
From A Grateful Uncle
CONTENTS
I. A Boy and His Dog
II. Romance
III. The Costume
IV. Desperation
V. The Pageant of the Table Round
VI. Evening
VII. Evils of Drink
VIII. School
IX. Soaring
X. Uncle John
XI. Fidelity of a Little Dog
XII. Miss Rennsdale Accepts
XIII. The Smallpox Medicine
XIV. Maurice Levy's Constitution
XV. The Two Families
XVI. The New Star
XVII. Retiring from the Show-Business
XVIII. Music
XIX. The Inner Boy
XX. Brothers of Angels
XXI. Rupe Collins
XXII. The Imitator
XXIII. Coloured Troops in Action
XXIV. “Little Gentleman”
XXV. Tar
XXVI. The Quiet Afternoon
XXVII. Conclusion of the Quiet Afternoon
XXVIII. Twelve
XXIX. Fanchon
XXX. The Birthday Party
XXXI. Over the Fence
CHAPTER I A BOY AND HIS DOG
Penrod sat morosely upon the back fence and gazed with envy at Duke, his
wistful dog.
A bitter soul dominated the various curved and angular surfaces known
by a careless world as the face of Penrod Schofield. Except in solitude,
that face was almost always cryptic and emotionless; for Penrod had
come into his twelfth year wearing an expression carefully trained to be
inscrutable. Since the world was sure to misunderstand everything, mere
defensive instinct prompted him to give it as little as possible to lay
hold upon. Nothing is more impenetrable than the face of a boy who has
learned this, and Penrod's was habitually as fathomless as the depth
of his hatred this morning for the literary activities of Mrs. Lora
Rewbush--an almost universally respected fellow citizen, a lady of
charitable and poetic inclinations, and one of his own mother's most
intimate friends.
Mrs. Lora Rewbush had written something which she called “The Children's
Pageant of the Table Round,” and it was to be performed in public that
very afternoon at the Women's Arts and Guild Hall for the benefit of the
Coloured Infants' Betterment Society. And if any flavour of sweetness
remained in the nature of Penrod Schofield after the dismal trials of
the school-week just past, that problematic, infinitesimal remnant was
made pungent acid by the imminence of his destiny to form a prominent
feature of the spectacle, and to declaim the loathsome sentiments of a
character named upon the programme the Child Sir Lancelot.
After each rehearsal he had plotted escape, and only ten days earlier
there had been a glimmer of light: Mrs. Lora Rewbush caught a very
bad cold, and it was hoped it might develop into pneumonia; but she
recovered so quickly that not even a rehearsal of the Children's Pageant
was postponed. Darkness closed in. Penrod had rather vaguely debated
plans for a self-mutilation such as would make his appearance as the
Child Sir Lancelot inexpedient on public grounds; it was a heroic
and attractive thought, but the results of some extremely sketchy
preliminary experiments caused him to abandon it.
There was no escape; and at last his hour was hard upon him. Therefore
he brooded on the fence and gazed with envy at his wistful Duke.
The dog's name was undescriptive of his person, which was obviously
the result of a singular series of mesalliances. He wore a grizzled
moustache and indefinite whiskers; he was small and shabby, and looked
like an old postman. Penrod envied Duke because he was sure Duke would
never be compelled to be a Child Sir Lancelot. He thought a dog free and
unshackled to go or come as the wind listeth. Penrod forgot the life he
led Duke.
There was a long soliloquy upon the fence, a plaintive monologue without
words: the boy's thoughts were adjectives, but they were expressed by
a running film of pictures in his mind's eye, morbidly prophetic of the
hideosities before him. Finally he spoke aloud, with such spleen that
Duke rose from his haunches and lifted one ear in keen anxiety.
“'I hight Sir Lancelot du Lake, the Child,
Gentul-hearted, meek, and mild.
What though I'm BUT a littul child,
Gentul-hearted, meek, and----' OOF!”
All of this except “oof” was a quotation from the Child Sir Lancelot, as
conceived by Mrs. Lora Rewbush. Choking upon it, Penrod slid down from
the fence, and with slow and thoughtful steps entered a one-storied wing
of the stable, consisting of a single apartment, floored with cement and
used as a storeroom for broken bric-a-brac, old paint-buckets, decayed
garden-hose, worn-out carpets, dead furniture, and other condemned odds
and ends not yet considered hopeless enough to be given away.
In one corner stood a large box, a part of the building itself: it was
eight feet high and open at the top, and it had been constructed as a
sawdust magazine from which was drawn material for the horse's bed in
a stall on the other side of the partition. The big box, so high and
towerlike, so commodious, so suggestive, had ceased to fulfil its
legitimate function; though, providentially, it had been at least half
full of sawdust when the horse died. Two years had gone by since that
passing; an interregnum in transportation during which Penrod's father
was “thinking” (he explained sometimes) of an automobile. Meanwhile, the
gifted and generous sawdust-box had served brilliantly in war and peace:
it was Penrod's stronghold.
There was a partially defaced sign upon the front wall of the box; the
donjon-keep had known mercantile impulses:
The O. K. RaBiT Co.
PENROD ScHoFiELD AND CO.
iNQuiRE FOR PRicEs
This was a venture of the preceding vacation, and had netted, at one
time, an accrued and owed profit of $1.38. Prospects had been brightest
on the very eve of cataclysm. The storeroom was locked and guarded, but
twenty-seven rabbits and Belgian hares, old and young, had perished here
on a single night--through no human agency, but in a foray of cats, the
besiegers treacherously tunnelling up through the sawdust from the small
aperture which opened into the stall beyond the partition. Commerce has
its martyrs.
Penrod climbed upon a barrel, stood on tiptoe, grasped the rim of the
box; then, using a knot-hole as a stirrup, threw one leg over the top,
drew himself up, and dropped within. Standing upon the packed sawdust,
he was just tall enough to see over the top.
Duke had not followed him into the storeroom, but remained near the open
doorway in a concave and pessimistic attitude. Penrod felt in a dark
corner of the box and laid hands upon a simple apparatus consisting of
an old bushel-basket with a few yards of clothes-line tied to each of
its handles. He passed the ends of the lines over a big spool, which
revolved upon an axle of wire suspended from a beam overhead, and, with
the aid of this improvised pulley, lowered the empty basket until it
came to rest in an upright position upon the floor of the storeroom at
the foot of the sawdust-box.
“Eleva-ter!” shouted Penrod. “Ting-ting!”
Duke, old and intelligently apprehensive, approached slowly, in a
semicircular manner, deprecatingly, but with courtesy. He pawed the
basket delicately; then, as if that were all his master had expected of
him, uttered one bright bark, sat down, and looked up triumphantly. His
hypocrisy was shallow: many a horrible quarter of an hour had taught him
his duty in this matter.
“El-e-VAY-ter!” shouted Penrod sternly. “You want me to come down there
to you?”
Duke looked suddenly haggard. He pawed the basket feebly again and,
upon another outburst from on high, prostrated himself flat. Again
threatened, he gave a superb impersonation of a worm.
“You get in that el-e-VAY-ter!”
Reckless with despair, Duke jumped into the basket, landing in a
dishevelled posture, which he did not alter until he had been drawn
up and poured out upon the floor of sawdust with the box. There,
shuddering, he lay in doughnut shape and presently slumbered.
It was dark in the box, a condition that might have been remedied by
sliding back a small wooden panel on runners, which would have let in
ample light from the alley; but Penrod Schofield had more interesting
means of illumination. He knelt, and from a former soap-box, in a
corner, took a lantern, without a chimney, and a large oil-can, the leak
in the latter being so nearly imperceptible that its banishment
from household use had seemed to Penrod as inexplicable as it was
providential.
He shook the lantern near his ear: nothing splashed; there was no sound
but a dry clinking. But there was plenty of kerosene in the can; and he
filled the lantern, striking a match to illumine the operation. Then he
lit the lantern and hung it upon a nail against the wall. The sawdust
floor was slightly impregnated with oil, and the open flame quivered in
suggestive proximity to the side of the box; however, some rather deep
charrings of the plank against which the lantern hung offered evidence
that the arrangement was by no means a new one, and indicated at least a
possibility of no fatality occurring this time.
Next, Penrod turned up the surface of the sawdust in another corner
of the floor, and drew forth a cigar-box in which were half a
dozen cigarettes, made of hayseed and thick brown wrapping paper, a
lead-pencil, an eraser, and a small note-book, the cover of which was
labelled in his own handwriting:
“English Grammar. Penrod Schofield. Room 6, Ward School Nomber Seventh.”
The first page of this book was purely academic; but the study of
English undefiled terminated with a slight jar at the top of the second:
“Nor must an adverb be used to modif----”
Immediately followed:
“HARoLD RAMoREZ THE RoADAGENT
OR WiLD LiFE AMoNG THE
ROCKY MTS.”
And the subsequent entries in the book appeared to have little concern
with Room 6, Ward School Nomber Seventh.