After lunch his mother and his sister Margaret, a pretty girl of
nineteen, dressed him for the sacrifice. They stood him near his
mother's bedroom window and did what they would to him.
During the earlier anguishes of the process he was mute, exceeding the
pathos of the stricken calf in the shambles; but a student of eyes
might have perceived in his soul the premonitory symptoms of a sinister
uprising. At a rehearsal (in citizens' clothes) attended by mothers and
grown-up sisters, Mrs. Lora Rewbush had announced that she wished the
costuming to be “as medieval and artistic as possible.” Otherwise, and
as to details, she said, she would leave the costumes entirely to the
good taste of the children's parents. Mrs. Schofield and Margaret were
no archeologists, but they knew that their taste was as good as that of
other mothers and sisters concerned; so with perfect confidence they had
planned and executed a costume for Penrod; and the only misgiving they
felt was connected with the tractability of the Child Sir Lancelot
himself.
Stripped to his underwear, he had been made to wash himself vehemently;
then they began by shrouding his legs in a pair of silk stockings, once
blue but now mostly whitish. Upon Penrod they visibly surpassed mere
ampleness; but they were long, and it required only a rather loose
imagination to assume that they were tights.
The upper part of his body was next concealed from view by a garment
so peculiar that its description becomes difficult. In 1886, Mrs.
Schofield, then unmarried, had worn at her “coming-out party” a dress of
vivid salmon silk which had been remodelled after her marriage to accord
with various epochs of fashion until a final, unskilful campaign at a
dye-house had left it in a condition certain to attract much attention
to the wearer. Mrs. Schofield had considered giving it to Della, the
cook; but had decided not to do so, because you never could tell how
Della was going to take things, and cooks were scarce.
It may have been the word “medieval” (in Mrs. Lora Rewbush's rich
phrase) which had inspired the idea for a last conspicuous usefulness;
at all events, the bodice of that once salmon dress, somewhat modified
and moderated, now took a position, for its farewell appearance in
society, upon the back, breast, and arms of the Child Sir Lancelot.
The area thus costumed ceased at the waist, leaving a Jaeger-like and
unmedieval gap thence to the tops of the stockings. The inventive genius
of woman triumphantly bridged it, but in a manner which imposes upon
history almost insuperable delicacies of narration. Penrod's father
was an old-fashioned man: the twentieth century had failed to shake his
faith in red flannel for cold weather; and it was while Mrs. Schofield
was putting away her husband's winter underwear that she perceived how
hopelessly one of the elder specimens had dwindled; and simultaneously
she received the inspiration which resulted in a pair of trunks for the
Child Sir Lancelot, and added an earnest bit of colour, as well as a
genuine touch of the Middle Ages, to his costume. Reversed, fore to aft,
with the greater part of the legs cut off, and strips of silver braid
covering the seams, this garment, she felt, was not traceable to its
original source.
When it had been placed upon Penrod, the stockings were attached to it
by a system of safety-pins, not very perceptible at a distance. Next,
after being severely warned against stooping, Penrod got his feet into
the slippers he wore to dancing-school--“patent-leather pumps” now
decorated with large pink rosettes.
“If I can't stoop,” he began, smolderingly, “I'd like to know how'm I
goin' to kneel in the pag----”
“You must MANAGE!” This, uttered through pins, was evidently thought to
be sufficient.
They fastened some ruching about his slender neck, pinned ribbons at
random all over him, and then Margaret thickly powdered his hair.
“Oh, yes, that's all right,” she said, replying to a question put by her
mother. “They always powdered their hair in Colonial times.”
“It doesn't seem right to me--exactly,” objected Mrs. Schofield, gently.
“Sir Lancelot must have been ever so long before Colonial times.”
“That doesn't matter,” Margaret reassured her. “Nobody'll know the
difference--Mrs. Lora Rewbush least of all. I don't think she knows a
thing about it, though, of course, she does write splendidly and the
words of the pageant are just beautiful. Stand still, Penrod!” (The
author of “Harold Ramorez” had moved convulsively.) “Besides, powdered
hair's always becoming. Look at him. You'd hardly know it was Penrod!”
The pride and admiration with which she pronounced this undeniable truth
might have been thought tactless, but Penrod, not analytical, found his
spirits somewhat elevated. No mirror was in his range of vision and,
though he had submitted to cursory measurements of his person a week
earlier, he had no previous acquaintance with the costume. He began
to form a not unpleasing mental picture of his appearance, something
somewhere between the portraits of George Washington and a vivid memory
of Miss Julia Marlowe at a matinee of “Twelfth Night.”
He was additionally cheered by a sword which had been borrowed from a
neighbor, who was a Knight of Pythias. Finally there was a mantle, an
old golf cape of Margaret's. Fluffy polka-dots of white cotton had been
sewed to it generously; also it was ornamented with a large cross of
red flannel, suggested by the picture of a Crusader in a newspaper
advertisement. The mantle was fastened to Penrod's shoulder (that is,
to the shoulder of Mrs. Schofield's ex-bodice) by means of large
safety-pins, and arranged to hang down behind him, touching his heels,
but obscuring nowise the glory of his facade. Then, at last, he was
allowed to step before a mirror.
It was a full-length glass, and the worst immediately happened. It might
have been a little less violent, perhaps, if Penrod's expectations had
not been so richly and poetically idealized; but as things were, the
revolt was volcanic.
Victor Hugo's account of the fight with the devil-fish, in “Toilers
of the Sea,” encourages a belief that, had Hugo lived and increased in
power, he might have been equal to a proper recital of the half
hour which followed Penrod's first sight of himself as the Child Sir
Lancelot. But Mr. Wilson himself, dastard but eloquent foe of Harold
Ramorez, could not have expressed, with all the vile dashes at
his command, the sentiments which animated Penrod's bosom when the
instantaneous and unalterable conviction descended upon him that he was
intended by his loved ones to make a public spectacle of himself in his
sister's stockings and part of an old dress of his mother's.
To him these familiar things were not disguised at all; there seemed no
possibility that the whole world would not know them at a glance. The
stockings were worse than the bodice. He had been assured that these
could not be recognized, but, seeing them in the mirror, he was sure
that no human eye could fail at first glance to detect the difference
between himself and the former purposes of these stockings. Fold,
wrinkle, and void shrieked their history with a hundred tongues,
invoking earthquake, eclipse, and blue ruin. The frantic youth's final
submission was obtained only after a painful telephonic conversation
between himself and his father, the latter having been called up and
upon, by the exhausted Mrs. Schofield, to subjugate his offspring by
wire.
The two ladies made all possible haste, after this, to deliver
Penrod into the hands of Mrs. Lora Rewbush; nevertheless, they found
opportunity to exchange earnest congratulations upon his not having
recognized the humble but serviceable paternal garment now brilliant
about the Lancelotish middle. Altogether, they felt that the costume
was a success. Penrod looked like nothing ever remotely imagined by
Sir Thomas Malory or Alfred Tennyson;--for that matter, he looked like
nothing ever before seen on earth; but as Mrs. Schofield and Margaret
took their places in the audience at the Women's Arts and Guild Hall,
the anxiety they felt concerning Penrod's elocutionary and gesticular
powers, so soon to be put to public test, was pleasantly tempered by
their satisfaction that, owing to their efforts, his outward appearance
would be a credit to the family.