America Moved. Booth Tarkington

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СКАЧАТЬ boys who make the homeward processions of children, after school, into riots; and in our own daily parade he often singled me out to play the poorer part in a jovial performance of which he was fond. Butted from the pavement, I was slammed horribly face down into the gutter, with Launce sitting upon my head and bellowing jollily for everyone’s attention, “Take a head-load, Boothie! Look at Boothie taking a head-load!”

      Prostrate, squirming, eyes and mouth filled with dust or mud, I had ignoble glimpses from under the seated Launce of boys and girls rocking in laughter; but I was as helpless as a day-old calf. Later every afternoon I clumsily practiced the manly art with a punching bag in our stable and discouragedly examined muscles that never enlarged enough to fulfill my bitter hope some day to “lick Launce Chapman.”

      I couldn’t lick anybody. For one reason, I couldn’t get “mad” enough. Other boys, in conflict, could reach a berserk pitch at which they did actual damage, but I couldn’t get that way. Even when they threw stones at my dog I couldn’t fight for him; could only crouch over him, receiving helplessly the missiles upon my own body. One day I did somehow find myself in a stand-up fight with a rich little German boy of our neighborhood. He may have known how it came about, I didn’t; but there we were, punching each other, with a ring of delighted friends about us, urging us to hit harder and in designated localities, especially the nose. I didn’t wish to hit harder; I forcelessly pounded Louis about the chest and shoulders and was wholly incapable, morally, of directing my fist against any part of his face. Louis had no such delicate compunction. He smashed me on the nose, bloodied it, and evoked from me, unfortunately, the shrill reproachful inquiry, “Louis, did you mean that?”

      The happy, boyish countenances about us pressed close upon me; all voices shouted in ecstasy, “Did he mean it? Did he? Look at your nose!”

      The Clicks

      The most elementary self-defense was beyond me. People of today, accustomed to think youthful felonies a product of strictly modern life, may be surprised to learn that well-dressed little boys in such a town as Indianapolis sixty years ago were often held up and robbed by small gangsters of their own age. We victims didn’t speak of them as gangsters; we knew them as members of what we called “clicks,” deriving the word, I suppose, from “clique.” Skating upon frozen little waters about the fringes of the inland town, or swimming in such fluids in summer, boys from our neighborhood would raise the cry, “Look out! Look out! Here comes Mike Donegan and his click!” Those of us who didn’t or couldn’t flee were surrounded, cursed, overawed, and robbed of penknives, nickels, marbles, tops.

      One afternoon Georgie Chapman and I, returning from a matinee, were relieved of belongings almost in the business center of the city. Five or six shabbily dressed boys, none over eleven, an unknown click, surrounded us, pushed us back against a wall; and their chieftain, blaspheming horribly, threatened our throats with the blade of a jackknife.

      I said feebly, “My father’s a policeman,” but Georgie, with a silver quarter in his pocket, had the courage to call for help. He shouted at the top of his lungs, “Help! Help! Help!”

      Adult passers-by glanced at us absently and went their ways. The thieves took Georgie’s quarter, his necktie and my own, and our handkerchiefs; then walked away—and so did we, in the opposite direction, very resentful, but not inclined to pursue the matter further.

      I’d looked forward to being ten years old. In youth the ages of man, expressed in round numbers, loom ahead of him as desirable and impressive—until he attains them. I’d thought that when I reached ten I should automatically be a person of greater consequence than previously, that I should by virtue of years be treated universally with more respect. Nothing like this happened. Outdoors with my fellows, except that I could make as much noise as anybody, I was rather worse than negligible. In every sport I was least among the little. I couldn’t hold a thrown or batted ball, not even when I got my hands on it. I couldn’t bat; I was a duffer with marbles or at kite flying, and I couldn’t wind a string about a top so that the top would spin. I could sit upon a horse and continue to guide him if he was in a tractable mood, but that was about all.

      By heredity I should have been able to do all these things well, and I suppose that my chosen environment was what hampered me. I was an indoor boy by inclination and lacked the practice in sports that outdoor boys develop together. Moreover, being less and less equal to them when I went outdoors and among them, I naturally reverted increasingly to the library at home, and my associates were more and more my father and my mother and my twenty-year-old sister.

      In the evenings my father had always read much to me—Tales of a Grandfather and like books—and during the summer when I was eight I’d gladly come in from play every afternoon to read Guizot’s History of France with my mother, who had the art of making historical personages dramatically real. I lived in a warming glamour with Guizot’s people, from Vercingetorix to Clovis, from Clovis to Louis XI, and from Louis XI to Voltaire and to Louis XVI. At nine and ten I was much occupied with Shakespeare, Dickens, histories of England and the United States, and a scattering run of novels: John Halifax, Gentleman; Ivanhoe; Zanoni; Beulah; The Woman in White; Les Misérables; Love Me Little, Love Me Long; The Vicar of Wakefield; Ten Thousand a Year; The Spy—memory fails upon the rest of this potpourri.

      A Fourth-Grade Feud

      In those days, one or two small private schools for children struggled rather feebly to keep alive in Indianapolis; but our public schools were incomparably better and we who attended them felt superior to the few weaklings at the tenderer institutions. My first three years at school were wholly agreeable. I was a good little boy, loved my teachers, was praised and smiled upon; and then, with a strange abruptness, I reversed all this and my life was changed. We had a new teacher, a brilliantly pretty young woman who produced for me my decisive turning point—and from the first I did not love her.

      I had expected to love her and to be beloved in return. I had thought that she would recognize me instantly as her best pupil, but she didn’t. I had the manner of being her best pupil, privileged, near the throne, and virtually an official, but she didn’t seem to see me in that light. That she didn’t was visible to me in her expression. Within the hour when she took charge of us, her lovely bright eyes several times fixed themselves upon my officious young face uncaressingly, and I perceived in them an estimating disfavor. For the first time since my first day in school, I broke a rule; I whispered to the boy across the aisle—and had my first punishment. The boy across the aisle and I were both kept after school.

      We were supposed to sit in silence for twenty minutes, but, when perhaps a third of the time had passed, the new teacher, as bored as we were, left the room to chat with somebody in the corridor. I hopped up brightly and began to entertain the other boy by drawing “funny pictures” on the blackboard. This was a great sin and perhaps it was the excitement in him roused by my daring that made him laugh aloud, a sound that brought Miss Jeffson suddenly back into the room. She looked at me and I looked at her, and something fundamentally inimical seemed to be exchanged in the glance.

      “Is this what you usually do when you’re kept after school?” she asked.

      My impulse was to tell her that I’d never before been kept after school; I wasn’t that sort of person. Instead, I tried something I thought rather impressive. I’d display before her a more important word than she’d used.

      “Usually?” I said. “No; not generally. No, generally I don’t.”

      Upon this a slight change in her face betokened her assurance that, though inexperienced, she knew how to deal with fresh little squirts. “Oh, you don’t?” she said. “Not ‘generally’!”

      She spoke in a tone that then and there ended my career as a best pupil. We were enemies—virtually open ones—from that moment.

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