This busy globe which spawns us is as incapable of flattery and as
intent upon its own affair, whatever that is, as a gyroscope; it keeps
steadily whirling along its lawful track, and, thus far seeming to hold
a right of way, spins doggedly on, with no perceptible diminution of
speed to mark the most gigantic human events--it did not pause to pant
and recuperate even when what seemed to Penrod its principal purpose
was accomplished, and an enormous shadow, vanishing westward over its
surface, marked the dawn of his twelfth birthday.
To be twelve is an attainment worth the struggle. A boy, just twelve, is
like a Frenchman just elected to the Academy.
Distinction and honour wait upon him. Younger boys show deference to a
person of twelve: his experience is guaranteed, his judgment, therefore,
mellow; consequently, his influence is profound. Eleven is not quite
satisfactory: it is only an approach. Eleven has the disadvantage of
six, of nineteen, of forty-four, and of sixty-nine. But, like twelve,
seven is an honourable age, and the ambition to attain it is laudable.
People look forward to being seven. Similarly, twenty is worthy, and so,
arbitrarily, is twenty-one; forty-five has great solidity; seventy is
most commendable and each year thereafter an increasing honour. Thirteen
is embarrassed by the beginnings of a new colthood; the child becomes a
youth. But twelve is the very top of boyhood.
Dressing, that morning, Penrod felt that the world was changed from the
world of yesterday. For one thing, he seemed to own more of it; this
day was HIS day. And it was a day worth owning; the midsummer sunshine,
pouring gold through his window, came from a cool sky, and a breeze
moved pleasantly in his hair as he leaned from the sill to watch the
tribe of clattering blackbirds take wing, following their leader
from the trees in the yard to the day's work in the open country. The
blackbirds were his, as the sunshine and the breeze were his, for they
all belonged to the day which was his birthday and therefore most surely
his. Pride suffused him: he was twelve!
His father and his mother and Margaret seemed to understand the
difference between to-day and yesterday. They were at the table when
he descended, and they gave him a greeting which of itself marked the
milestone. Habitually, his entrance into a room where his elders sat
brought a cloud of apprehension: they were prone to look up in pathetic
expectancy, as if their thought was, “What new awfulness is he going to
start NOW?” But this morning they laughed; his mother rose and kissed
him twelve times, so did Margaret; and his father shouted, “Well, well!
How's the MAN?”
Then his mother gave him a Bible and “The Vicar of Wakefield”; Margaret
gave him a pair of silver-mounted hair brushes; and his father gave him
a “Pocket Atlas” and a small compass.
“And now, Penrod,” said his mother, after breakfast, “I'm going to
take you out in the country to pay your birthday respects to Aunt Sarah
Crim.”
Aunt Sarah Crim, Penrod's great-aunt, was his oldest living relative.
She was ninety, and when Mrs. Schofield and Penrod alighted from a
carriage at her gate they found her digging with a spade in the garden.
“I'm glad you brought him,” she said, desisting from labour. “Jinny's
baking a cake I'm going to send for his birthday party. Bring him in the
house. I've got something for him.”
She led the way to her “sitting-room,” which had a pleasant smell,
unlike any other smell, and, opening the drawer of a shining old
what-not, took therefrom a boy's “sling-shot,” made of a forked stick,
two strips of rubber and a bit of leather.
“This isn't for you,” she said, placing it in Penrod's eager hand.
“No. It would break all to pieces the first time you tried to shoot
it, because it is thirty-five years old. I want to send it back to your
father. I think it's time. You give it to him from me, and tell him
I say I believe I can trust him with it now. I took it away from him
thirty-five years ago, one day after he'd killed my best hen with
it, accidentally, and broken a glass pitcher on the back porch with
it--accidentally. He doesn't look like a person who's ever done things
of that sort, and I suppose he's forgotten it so well that he believes
he never DID, but if you give it to him from me I think he'll remember.
You look like him, Penrod. He was anything but a handsome boy.”
After this final bit of reminiscence--probably designed to be repeated
to Mr. Schofield--she disappeared in the direction of the kitchen,
and returned with a pitcher of lemonade and a blue china dish sweetly
freighted with flat ginger cookies of a composition that was her own
secret. Then, having set this collation before her guests, she presented
Penrod with a superb, intricate, and very modern machine of destructive
capacities almost limitless. She called it a pocket-knife.
“I suppose you'll do something horrible with it,” she said, composedly.
“I hear you do that with everything, anyhow, so you might as well do it
with this, and have more fun out of it. They tell me you're the Worst
Boy in Town.”
“Oh, Aunt Sarah!” Mrs. Schofield lifted a protesting hand.
“Nonsense!” said Mrs. Crim.
“But on his birthday!”
“That's the time to say it. Penrod, aren't you the Worst Boy in Town?”
Penrod, gazing fondly upon his knife and eating cookies rapidly,
answered as a matter of course, and absently, “Yes'm.”
“Certainly!” said Mrs. Crim. “Once you accept a thing about yourself
as established and settled, it's all right. Nobody minds. Boys are just
people, really.”
“No, no!” Mrs. Schofield cried, involuntarily.
“Yes, they are,” returned Aunt Sarah. “Only they're not quite so awful,
because they haven't learned to cover themselves all over with little
pretences. When Penrod grows up he'll be just the same as he is now,
except that whenever he does what he wants to do he'll tell himself and
other people a little story about it to make his reason for doing it
seem nice and pretty and noble.”
“No, I won't!” said Penrod suddenly.
“There's one cookie left,” observed Aunt Sarah. “Are you going to eat
it?”
“Well,” said her great-nephew, thoughtfully, “I guess I better.”
“Why?” asked the old lady. “Why do you guess you'd 'better'?”
“Well,” said Penrod, with a full mouth, “it might get all dried up if
nobody took it, and get thrown out and wasted.”
“You're beginning finely,” Mrs. Crim remarked. “A year ago you'd have
taken the cookie without the same sense of thrift.”
“Ma'am?”
“Nothing. I see that you're twelve years old, that's all. There are more
cookies, Penrod.” She went away, returning with a fresh supply and the
observation, “Of course, you'll be sick before the day's over; you might
as well get a good start.”
Mrs. Schofield looked thoughtful. “Aunt Sarah,” she ventured, “don't you
really think we improve as we get older?”
“Meaning,” said the old lady, “that Penrod hasn't much chance to escape
the penitentiary if he doesn't? Well, we do learn to restrain ourselves
in some things; and there are people who really want someone else to
take the last cookie, though they aren't very common. But it's all
right, the world seems to be getting on.” She gazed whimsically upon her
great-nephew and added, “Of course, when you watch a boy and think about
him, it doesn't seem to be getting on very fast.”
Penrod moved uneasily in his chair; he was conscious that he was her
topic but unable to make out whether or not her observations were
complimentary; he inclined to think they were not. Mrs. Crim settled the
question for him.
“I suppose Penrod is regarded as the neighbourhood curse?”
“Oh, no,” cried Mrs. Schofield. “He----”
“I dare say the neighbours are right,” continued the old lady placidly.
“He's had to repeat the history of the race and go through all the
stages from the primordial to barbarism. You don't expect boys to be
civilized, do you?”
“Well, I----”
“You might as well expect eggs to crow. No; you've got to take boys as
they are, and learn to know them as they are.”
“Naturally, Aunt Sarah,” said Mrs. Schofield, “I KNOW Penrod.”
Aunt Sarah laughed heartily. “Do you think his father knows him, too?”
“Of course, men are different,” Mrs. Schofield returned, apologetically.
“But a mother knows----”
“Penrod,” said Aunt Sarah, solemnly, “does your father understand you?”
“Ma'am?”
“About as much as he'd understand Sitting Bull!” she laughed.
“And I'll tell you what your mother thinks you are, Penrod. Her real
belief is that you're a novice in a convent.”
“Ma'am?”
“Aunt Sarah!”
“I know she thinks that, because whenever you don't behave like a novice
she's disappointed in you. And your father really believes that you're
a decorous, well-trained young business man, and whenever you don't
live up to that standard you get on his nerves and he thinks you need a
walloping. I'm sure a day very seldom passes without their both saying
they don't know what on earth to do with you. Does whipping do you any
good, Penrod?”
“Ma'am?”
“Go on and finish the lemonade; there's about glassful left. Oh, take
it, take it; and don't say why! Of COURSE you're a little pig.”
Penrod laughed gratefully, his eyes fixed upon her over the rim of his
uptilted glass.
“Fill yourself up uncomfortably,” said the old lady. “You're twelve
years old, and you ought to be happy--if you aren't anything else. It's
taken over nineteen hundred years of Christianity and some hundreds of
thousands of years of other things to produce you, and there you sit!”
“Ma'am?”
“It'll be your turn to struggle and muss things up, for the betterment
of posterity, soon enough,” said Aunt Sarah Crim. “Drink your lemonade!”