The midsummer sun was stinging hot outside the little barber-shop next
to the corner drug store and Penrod, undergoing a toilette preliminary
to his very slowly approaching twelfth birthday, was adhesive enough to
retain upon his face much hair as it fell from the shears. There is a
mystery here: the tonsorial processes are not unagreeable to manhood; in
truth, they are soothing; but the hairs detached from a boy's head get
into his eyes, his ears, his nose, his mouth, and down his neck, and he
does everywhere itch excruciatingly. Wherefore he blinks, winks, weeps,
twitches, condenses his countenance, and squirms; and perchance the
barber's scissors clip more than intended--belike an outlying flange of
ear.
“Um--muh--OW!” said Penrod, this thing having happened.
“D' I touch y' up a little?” inquired the barber, smiling falsely.
“Ooh--UH!” The boy in the chair offered inarticulate protest, as the
wound was rubbed with alum.
“THAT don't hurt!” said the barber. “You WILL get it, though, if you
don't sit stiller,” he continued, nipping in the bud any attempt on the
part of his patient to think that he already had “it.”
“Pfuff!” said Penrod, meaning no disrespect, but endeavoring to dislodge
a temporary moustache from his lip.
“You ought to see how still that little Georgie Bassett sits,” the
barber went on, reprovingly. “I hear everybody says he's the best boy in
town.”
“Pfuff! PHIRR!” There was a touch of intentional contempt in this.
“I haven't heard nobody around the neighbourhood makin' no such
remarks,” added the barber, “about nobody of the name of Penrod
Schofield.”
“Well,” said Penrod, clearing his mouth after a struggle, “who wants 'em
to? Ouch!”
“I hear they call Georgie Bassett the 'little gentleman,'” ventured the
barber, provocatively, meeting with instant success.
“They better not call ME that,” returned Penrod truculently. “I'd like
to hear anybody try. Just once, that's all! I bet they'd never try it
ag----OUCH!”
“Why? What'd you do to 'em?”
“It's all right what I'd DO! I bet they wouldn't want to call me that
again long as they lived!”
“What'd you do if it was a little girl? You wouldn't hit her, would
you?”
“Well, I'd----Ouch!”
“You wouldn't hit a little girl, would you?” the barber persisted,
gathering into his powerful fingers a mop of hair from the top of
Penrod's head and pulling that suffering head into an unnatural
position. “Doesn't the Bible say it ain't never right to hit the weak
sex?”
“Ow! SAY, look OUT!”
“So you'd go and punch a pore, weak, little girl, would you?” said the
barber, reprovingly.
“Well, who said I'd hit her?” demanded the chivalrous Penrod. “I bet I'd
FIX her though, all right. She'd see!”
“You wouldn't call her names, would you?”
“No, I wouldn't! What hurt is it to call anybody names?”
“Is that SO!” exclaimed the barber. “Then you was intending what I heard
you hollering at Fisher's grocery delivery wagon driver fer a favour,
the other day when I was goin' by your house, was you? I reckon I better
tell him, because he says to me after-WERDS if he ever lays eyes on you
when you ain't in your own yard, he's goin' to do a whole lot o' things
you ain't goin' to like! Yessir, that's what he says to ME!”
“He better catch me first, I guess, before he talks so much.”
“Well,” resumed the barber, “that ain't sayin' what you'd do if a young
lady ever walked up and called you a little gentleman. _I_ want to hear
what you'd do to her. I guess I know, though--come to think of it.”
“What?” demanded Penrod.
“You'd sick that pore ole dog of yours on her cat, if she had one, I
expect,” guessed the barber derisively.
“No, I would not!”
“Well, what WOULD you do?”
“I'd do enough. Don't worry about that!”
“Well, suppose it was a boy, then: what'd you do if a boy come up to you
and says, 'Hello, little gentleman'?”
“He'd be lucky,” said Penrod, with a sinister frown, “if he got home
alive.”
“Suppose it was a boy twice your size?”
“Just let him try,” said Penrod ominously. “You just let him try. He'd
never see daylight again; that's all!”
The barber dug ten active fingers into the helpless scalp before him
and did his best to displace it, while the anguished Penrod, becoming
instantly a seething crucible of emotion, misdirected his natural
resentment into maddened brooding upon what he would do to a boy “twice
his size” who should dare to call him “little gentleman.” The barber
shook him as his father had never shaken him; the barber buffeted him,
rocked him frantically to and fro; the barber seemed to be trying to
wring his neck; and Penrod saw himself in staggering zigzag pictures,
destroying large, screaming, fragmentary boys who had insulted him.
The torture stopped suddenly; and clenched, weeping eyes began to see
again, while the barber applied cooling lotions which made Penrod smell
like a coloured housemaid's ideal.
“Now what,” asked the barber, combing the reeking locks gently, “what
would it make you so mad fer, to have somebody call you a little
gentleman? It's a kind of compliment, as it were, you might say. What
would you want to hit anybody fer THAT fer?”
To the mind of Penrod, this question was without meaning or
reasonableness. It was within neither his power nor his desire to
analyze the process by which the phrase had become offensive to him,
and was now rapidly assuming the proportions of an outrage. He knew only
that his gorge rose at the thought of it.
“You just let 'em try it!” he said threateningly, as he slid down from
the chair. And as he went out of the door, after further conversation
on the same subject, he called back those warning words once more: “Just
let 'em try it! Just once--that's all _I_ ask 'em to. They'll find out
what they GET!”
The barber chuckled. Then a fly lit on the barber's nose and he slapped
at it, and the slap missed the fly but did not miss the nose. The barber
was irritated. At this moment his birdlike eye gleamed a gleam as it
fell upon customers approaching: the prettiest little girl in the world,
leading by the hand her baby brother, Mitchy-Mitch, coming to have
Mitchy-Mitch's hair clipped, against the heat.
It was a hot day and idle, with little to feed the mind--and the barber
was a mischievous man with an irritated nose. He did his worst.
Meanwhile, the brooding Penrod pursued his homeward way; no great
distance, but long enough for several one-sided conflicts with malign
insulters made of thin air. “You better NOT call me that!” he muttered.
“You just try it, and you'll get what other people got when THEY tried
it. You better not ack fresh with ME! Oh, you WILL, will you?” He
delivered a vicious kick full upon the shins of an iron fence-post,
which suffered little, though Penrod instantly regretted his
indiscretion. “Oof!” he grunted, hopping; and went on after bestowing a
look of awful hostility upon the fence-post. “I guess you'll know better
next time,” he said, in parting, to this antagonist. “You just let me
catch you around here again and I'll----” His voice sank to inarticulate
but ominous murmurings. He was in a dangerous mood.
Nearing home, however, his belligerent spirit was diverted to happier
interests by the discovery that some workmen had left a caldron of tar
in the cross-street, close by his father's stable. He tested it, but
found it inedible. Also, as a substitute for professional chewing-gum
it was unsatisfactory, being insufficiently boiled down and too thin,
though of a pleasant, lukewarm temperature. But it had an excess of one
quality--it was sticky. It was the stickiest tar Penrod had ever used
for any purposes whatsoever, and nothing upon which he wiped his hands
served to rid them of it; neither his polka-dotted shirt waist nor his
knickerbockers; neither the fence, nor even Duke, who came unthinkingly
wagging out to greet him, and retired wiser.
Nevertheless, tar is tar. Much can be done with it, no matter what its
condition; so Penrod lingered by the caldron, though from a neighbouring
yard could be heard the voices of comrades, including that of Sam
Williams. On the ground about the caldron were scattered chips and
sticks and bits of wood to the number of a great multitude. Penrod mixed
quantities of this refuse into the tar, and interested himself in
seeing how much of it he could keep moving in slow swirls upon the ebon
surface.
Other surprises were arranged for the absent workmen. The caldron was
almost full, and the surface of the tar near the rim.
Penrod endeavoured to ascertain how many pebbles and brickbats, dropped
in, would cause an overflow. Labouring heartily to this end, he
had almost accomplished it, when he received the suggestion for an
experiment on a much larger scale. Embedded at the corner of a
grassplot across the street was a whitewashed stone, the size of a small
watermelon and serving no purpose whatever save the questionable one of
decoration. It was easily pried up with a stick; though getting it to
the caldron tested the full strength of the ardent labourer. Instructed
to perform such a task, he would have sincerely maintained its
impossibility but now, as it was unbidden, and promised rather
destructive results, he set about it with unconquerable energy, feeling
certain that he would be rewarded with a mighty splash. Perspiring,
grunting vehemently, his back aching and all muscles strained, he
progressed in short stages until the big stone lay at the base of the
caldron. He rested a moment, panting, then lifted the stone, and was
bending his shoulders for the heave that would lift it over the rim,
when a sweet, taunting voice, close behind him, startled him cruelly.
“How do you do, LITTLE GENTLEMAN!”
Penrod squawked, dropped the stone, and shouted, “Shut up, you dern
fool!” purely from instinct, even before his about-face made him aware
who had so spitefully addressed him.
It was Marjorie Jones. Always dainty, and prettily dressed, she was in
speckless and starchy white to-day, and a refreshing picture she made,
with the new-shorn and powerfully scented Mitchy-Mitch clinging to
her hand. They had stolen up behind the toiler, and now stood laughing
together in sweet merriment. Since the passing of Penrod's Rupe Collins
period he had experienced some severe qualms at the recollection of his
last meeting with Marjorie and his Apache behaviour; in truth, his heart
instantly became as wax at sight of her, and he would have offered
her fair speech; but, alas! in Marjorie's wonderful eyes there shone
a consciousness of new powers for his undoing, and she denied him
opportunity.
“Oh, OH!” she cried, mocking his pained outcry. “What a way for a LITTLE
GENTLEMAN to talk! Little gentleman don't say wicked----”
“Marjorie!” Penrod, enraged and dismayed, felt himself stung beyond all
endurance. Insult from her was bitterer to endure than from any other.
“Don't you call me that again!”
“Why not, LITTLE GENTLEMAN?”
He stamped his foot. “You better stop!”
Marjorie sent into his furious face her lovely, spiteful laughter.
“Little gentleman, little gentleman, little gentleman!” she said
deliberately. “How's the little gentleman, this afternoon? Hello, little
gentleman!”
Penrod, quite beside himself, danced eccentrically. “Dry up!” he howled.
“Dry up, dry up, dry up, dry UP!”
Mitchy-Mitch shouted with delight and applied a finger to the side
of the caldron--a finger immediately snatched away and wiped upon a
handkerchief by his fastidious sister.
“'Ittle gellamun!” said Mitchy-Mitch.
“You better look out!” Penrod whirled upon this small offender with
grim satisfaction. Here was at least something male that could without
dishonour be held responsible. “You say that again, and I'll give you
the worst----”
“You will NOT!” snapped Marjorie, instantly vitriolic. “He'll say just
whatever he wants to, and he'll say it just as MUCH as he wants to. Say
it again, Mitchy-Mitch!”
“'Ittle gellamun!” said Mitchy-Mitch promptly.
“Ow-YAH!” Penrod's tone-production was becoming affected by his mental
condition. “You say that again, and I'll----”
“Go on, Mitchy-Mitch,” cried Marjorie. “He can't do a thing. He don't
DARE! Say it some more, Mitchy-Mitch--say it a whole lot!”
Mitchy-Mitch, his small, fat face shining with confidence in his
immunity, complied.
“'Ittle gellamun!” he squeaked malevolently. “'Ittle gellamun! 'Ittle
gellamun! 'Ittle gellamun!”
The desperate Penrod bent over the whitewashed rock, lifted it, and
then--outdoing Porthos, John Ridd, and Ursus in one miraculous burst of
strength--heaved it into the air.
Marjorie screamed.
But it was too late. The big stone descended into the precise midst of
the caldron and Penrod got his mighty splash. It was far, far beyond his
expectations.
Spontaneously there were grand and awful effects--volcanic spectacles of
nightmare and eruption. A black sheet of eccentric shape rose out of the
caldron and descended upon the three children, who had no time to evade
it.
After it fell, Mitchy-Mitch, who stood nearest the caldron, was the
thickest, though there was enough for all. Br'er Rabbit would have fled
from any of them.