Next morning, when he had once more resumed the dreadful burden of
education, it seemed infinitely duller. And yet what pleasanter sight
is there than a schoolroom well filled with children of those sprouting
years just before the 'teens? The casual visitor, gazing from the
teacher's platform upon these busy little heads, needs only a blunted
memory to experience the most agreeable and exhilarating sensations.
Still, for the greater part, the children are unconscious of the
happiness of their condition; for nothing is more pathetically true than
that we “never know when we are well off.” The boys in a public school
are less aware of their happy state than are the girls; and of all the
boys in his room, probably Penrod himself had the least appreciation of
his felicity.
He sat staring at an open page of a textbook, but not studying; not even
reading; not even thinking. Nor was he lost in a reverie: his mind's eye
was shut, as his physical eye might well have been, for the optic nerve,
flaccid with ennui, conveyed nothing whatever of the printed page
upon which the orb of vision was partially focused. Penrod was doing
something very unusual and rare, something almost never accomplished
except by coloured people or by a boy in school on a spring day: he was
doing really nothing at all. He was merely a state of being.
From the street a sound stole in through the open window, and abhorring
Nature began to fill the vacuum called Penrod Schofield; for the sound
was the spring song of a mouth-organ, coming down the sidewalk. The
windows were intentionally above the level of the eyes of the seated
pupils; but the picture of the musician was plain to Penrod, painted for
him by a quality in the runs and trills, partaking of the oboe, of the
calliope, and of cats in anguish; an excruciating sweetness obtained
only by the wallowing, walloping yellow-pink palm of a hand whose back
was Congo black and shiny. The music came down the street and passed
beneath the window, accompanied by the care-free shuffling of a pair of
old shoes scuffing syncopations on the cement sidewalk. It passed into
the distance; became faint and blurred; was gone. Emotion stirred in
Penrod a great and poignant desire, but (perhaps fortunately) no fairy
godmother made her appearance.
Otherwise Penrod would have gone down the street in a black skin,
playing the mouth-organ, and an unprepared coloured youth would have
found himself enjoying educational advantages for which he had no
ambition whatever.
Roused from perfect apathy, the boy cast about the schoolroom an eye
wearied to nausea by the perpetual vision of the neat teacher upon the
platform, the backs of the heads of the pupils in front of him, and the
monotonous stretches of blackboard threateningly defaced by arithmetical
formulae and other insignia of torture. Above the blackboard, the
walls of the high room were of white plaster--white with the qualified
whiteness of old snow in a soft coal town. This dismal expanse was
broken by four lithographic portraits, votive offerings of a thoughtful
publisher. The portraits were of good and great men, kind men; men
who loved children. Their faces were noble and benevolent. But the
lithographs offered the only rest for the eyes of children fatigued by
the everlasting sameness of the schoolroom. Long day after long day,
interminable week in and interminable week out, vast month on vast
month, the pupils sat with those four portraits beaming kindness down
upon them. The faces became permanent in the consciousness of the
children; they became an obsession--in and out of school the children
were never free of them. The four faces haunted the minds of children
falling asleep; they hung upon the minds of children waking at night;
they rose forebodingly in the minds of children waking in the morning;
they became monstrously alive in the minds of children lying sick of
fever. Never, while the children of that schoolroom lived, would they
be able to forget one detail of the four lithographs: the hand of
Longfellow was fixed, for them, forever, in his beard. And by a simple
and unconscious association of ideas, Penrod Schofield was accumulating
an antipathy for the gentle Longfellow and for James Russell Lowell and
for Oliver Wendell Holmes and for John Greenleaf Whittier, which would
never permit him to peruse a work of one of those great New Englanders
without a feeling of personal resentment.
His eyes fell slowly and inimically from the brow of Whittier to
the braid of reddish hair belonging to Victorine Riordan, the little
octoroon girl who sat directly in front of him. Victorine's back was as
familiar to Penrod as the necktie of Oliver Wendell Holmes. So was her
gayly coloured plaid waist. He hated the waist as he hated Victorine
herself, without knowing why. Enforced companionship in large quantities
and on an equal basis between the sexes appears to sterilize the
affections, and schoolroom romances are few.
Victorine's hair was thick, and the brickish glints in it were
beautiful, but Penrod was very tired of it. A tiny knot of green ribbon
finished off the braid and kept it from unravelling; and beneath the
ribbon there was a final wisp of hair which was just long enough to
repose upon Penrod's desk when Victorine leaned back in her seat. It was
there now. Thoughtfully, he took the braid between thumb and forefinger,
and, without disturbing Victorine, dipped the end of it and the green
ribbon into the inkwell of his desk. He brought hair and ribbon forth
dripping purple ink, and partially dried them on a blotter, though, a
moment later when Victorine leaned forward, they were still able to add
a few picturesque touches to the plaid waist.
Rudolph Krauss, across the aisle from Penrod, watched the operation with
protuberant eyes, fascinated. Inspired to imitation, he took a piece of
chalk from his pocket and wrote “RATS” across the shoulder-blades of the
boy in front of him, then looked across appealingly to Penrod for tokens
of congratulation. Penrod yawned. It may not be denied that at times he
appeared to be a very self-centred boy.