Читать книгу America Moved - Booth Tarkington - Страница 10

Turned twelve I had a long mortification, involving sufferings never comprehended by my parents. Sympathetic in all other matters, indulgent beyond what their means afforded, they were, nevertheless, merely amused whenever I strove to make plain to them the special bitterness that was eating me. Among all the weaknesses of my character, as I now examine it, I find my twelve-year-old excitement about what was on my inconsequent legs to be one of the most humiliatingly revelatory. I wasn’t mortified by the dunderhead exhibitions I made of myself in the schoolroom; I wasn’t mortified by the disgraceful statistics reported by the teachers on damning cards sent to my parents after examinations; I wasn’t mortified by the batting of my eyes and fluctuations of my nose and ears in public, or by my throat’s clucking and glunking at people when I tried to talk to them. No; custom had dulled me to these inevitabilities—so I regarded them—and what made me so ashamed that I didn’t see how I could bear to go on living, unless I could effect a change, was the fact that I still wore knee breeches.

Boys of later generations will not understand this, least of all now when four-year-olds of both sexes are freely betrousered to the instep, but for a long period in American history boys were universally convinced that the first splendid step forward toward manhood was getting into long trousers. Immediately upon that uplifting enclosure we believed ourselves freed of the most poignantly offensive of all adjectives—“little.” A boy in long trousers wasn’t, ruinously, a little boy any more; he was a boy—in fact, almost a youth. Some of us, pets of destiny in being granted careless parents, accomplished the great change at ten; more were emancipated at eleven; and at twelve only a few were fondly and fashionably still pinioned down in knee-breeched little-boyness. Purgatorially, I was one of these.

Clothes Unmake the Man

With the peculiar aid of a grandfather, I had attempted a great stroke to improve my condition. Grandfather and Grandmother Booth spent the winters with us now; and he, almost ninety, retaining the fashion of the considerable men of his day, never wore outer garments except of dark broadcloth. Without difficulty I talked him into giving me two elderly pairs of his trousers and a dollar, and these I bore to a wearied foreign tailor with whom I’d been privately conducting urgent negotiations. I was small for my age, and my grandfather was of normal size for his; but the tailor was sure that even for a dollar he couldn’t get enough good cloth out of one pair of trousers somewhat worn; so there had to be two. The garment he made for me I brought home through the dusk of an eager day, and, examining the work by gaslight in my own room, I believed that I had a pair of trousers equal to any youth’s in the world.

After breakfast the next morning I put them on, got out of the house unobserved, and, on my way to school, walked down the street in a man’s sunlight. I went most of the way without passing anybody, then at a corner encountered a long shabby male person with auburn thin whiskers—I remember them. He observed me with some attention and burst into a loud, discordant laugh.

He upset me, rather, though I hadn’t the faintest idea what was the matter with him. At long last here I was, properly clad for the first time in years! He must be a doggone fool, I thought; something must be wrong with him to just look at a person and laugh like that. It appeared that even in long trousers you could never tell what whisker-growing adults were likely to do.

Making myself right for this life had brought me late to school, and when I reached my seat in the back row the teacher called upon me to come forward to her desk and try to explain my tardiness. I was so used to doing this, and my classmates were so accustomed to seeing me do it, that it was virtually routine; but as I passed down the aisle a titter followed me. It increased, grew louder irrepressibly, and, as I stood enduring it in the open space before the teacher, it attained the full volume of unanimous schoolroom laughter. I turned in plaintive inquiry; the teacher tapped her pencil sharply upon the desk, and then, as I turned back to her, I found that she’d grown red and seemed unable to express herself.

Feeling naked, I looked down at me, and saw only perfection. My mind was lost in mystification as she indistinctly dismissed me to my seat and I returned to it through a spluttering aisle.

At recess, immediately surrounded, I moved helplessly as the center of a ring of mirth lovers who made but one response to all my inquiries: “Look at your britches!”

I did, again and again, but without enlightenment. Not until I was on my homeward way for lunch did a true friend help me to discover what my dreamy grandfather hadn’t considered, what I in my happy haste hadn’t observed, and what the tailor hadn’t worried himself about.

“It’s your britches,” Henry told me. “They’re different colors.”

“But they aren’t!” I cried. “They’re just black! Haven’t I looked a thousand times?”

“Yea, but you keep looking down at you in front,” he said. “Maybe the nap in back’s turned a different way from the nap in front, or maybe they’re made out of somebody else’s different britches; but you may be black in front, but you’re gray behind. Anyhow you’re different colors.”

I was; and a few seconds after I reached home my agony in Grandfather Booth’s mixed trousers was over. The kind old man, lost in reverie, didn’t even notice that he never saw me in them. I gave him up as an ally.

Back into knee breeches and little-boyness again, I brooded longingly upon the far future when I’d be twenty-one and legally independent of a mother’s care. Especially on Saturdays, on my way to dancing school, I made plans for my twenty-first birthday, when I’d begin never wearing overshoes any more and would decline ever again to have anything whatever fastened on me with pins. I wouldn’t wear a white collar outside my jacket collar; I’d have a collar from a men’s store and it would be made secure with collar buttons. I wouldn’t have a wide silk ribbon under the collar and I wouldn’t permit any woman to tie such a ribbon into a bow under my chin; I’d have a ready-made necktie fastened with a buckle. And most of all I wouldn’t let any woman brush my hair; I’d have a barber come to the house every morning before breakfast and brush my hair for the day, no matter what he charged.

Dancing school was in the ballroom of the finest and largest house in Indianapolis, a neighbor’s; but that didn’t brighten my performances and undergoings there. I was no better at dancing than I was at anything else I tried to do with my feet, or hands, or both. Round and round the great room the small couples went, while the piano tinkled and the professor called: “One, two, three! One, two, three! One, two, three!”—and almost every single time any little girl shouted “Ouch!” it was because I’d stepped on her. Whenever I took my place in one of the formations for the quadrille or lancers, all the other participants looked about to see if they couldn’t get into another; and in the whole of my dancing-school experience, just one encouraging thing happened. It didn’t encourage me long.

At the center of the polished floor the most beautiful of the little girls—the star in all the dancing—stood holding a small round cap in her hand; and all the boys, under instructions from the professor, circled about her, learning a special figure of the dance then called the “german.” She was to place the cap upon the head of the boy with whom she wished to dance—and, startlingly, she stepped toward him who least expected to be chosen. Dazed, I felt the cap upon my transfigured head. Intoxicated, blue lights swimming about me, I danced with her, walked upon her little slippers, slid, skidded, staggered, bumped into everybody and floundered in Elysium. When it was over, another true friend of mine whispered to me congratulatingly:

“I’m glad Nellie picked you. It’s nice because some of the class think she’s stuck-up, but this proves to everybody how kindhearted she is.”

So it did—even to me.

Another maiden of the class showed kindness to me, or at least was philosophic and bore pain stoically; for, though her sensitive small face quivered, she never outright screeched when I stepped on her. I ill-requited her goodness. She was the littlest girl, exquisite, but only five years old, and, when her evil star doomed her to be my partner and I went clumping round the ballroom, towing her fairylike lightness and usually damaging it, I had no thought for her, but only pitied myself for looking too much the bigger half of an ill-assorted couple.

Jesse James, a Tragedy in Fourteen Acts

This self-pity was what caused me finally to write a note to her, palliating my absence from the last meeting of the dancing class that year, an occasion upon which the poor child was to have been my partner for the whole session. Fifteen years later, when in full-grown loveliness she burst upon me, so to speak, at another kind of dance and I entreated to be her partner, however briefly, she said yes, if I’d behave better than last time. Then she repeated verbatim the note I’d sent her “last time,” for her mother still kept it in a scrapbook. Long after that, when I was writing a story about a boy who was not at all myself, though of course here and there, in scattered spots, a slight reflection of bits of me, I printed the note as his; and this was it:

Dear Madam: Please excuse me from dancing the cotillion with you this afternoon as I have fell off the barn

Sincerely yours,

Newton Booth Tarkington.6

When summer again approached and I was near upon thirteen, still in knee breeches, I’d begun to grow lanky and I completed the manuscripts of two literary works. The first was a play, purest realism and also tragedy unmitigatedly. It dealt with the rise of its hero to great heights of ill fame, detailed not only his deeds of thievery but several accompanying murders; and it reached its climax and last curtain with his assassination—shot in the back as he stood on a chair hanging a picture, his destroyer being inexorably one of his own followers who, like most people, wanted to make some money. This play, I firmly recall, was a very model of austere playwriting; it conveyed no moral, had no bias, petted none of the “characters,” and, with the icy Olympian detachment that is the mark of the highest type of authorship, sought only to reveal its people by their own uncompelled acts and utterances. Its title had the esthetic starkness of the rest of it—Jesse James.

The cast was all male. In the last act only two appeared, the hero and his assassin; and both the action and the dialogue here stood forth in sharp relief against nothing—a masterpiece of that elimination of nonessentials now so favored in all the arts. Space permits me to quote the entire act. This was it:

Act 14

Enter Jesse James and Bob Ford.

Jesse: Well it is a nice day so I believe I will get on this chair and hang this picture up on the wall.

Bob: All right do.

Jesse gets up on the chair so Bob shoots him in the back with his revolver. Jesse falls off of the chair and dies down on the floor.

Curtain

Our stable being vacant for the time, except of vehicles, I directed, rehearsed, and produced Jesse James in the empty hayloft, coming thus into competition with another active theater two blocks up the alley. This other theater, also in a hayloft, was pretentious; and I visited it in a purely critical spirit. Its great boast was that it had a Gallery, a dangerous structure holding four, admission to the Gallery being five cents instead of the three cents charged for a safer and more comfortable seat nearer the stage.

Wearing an intendedly scornful expression, I paid the higher price, sat in the Gallery, and soon became aware of something familiar in the play enacted before me. I seemed to perceive certain resemblances—especially when one of the boys, wrapped in a previously white tablecloth, said to another: “Listen here; you listen now. You’re my son and I used to be your father; but now I’m his ghost and you got to do something because, listen, I was lying down somewheres taking a nap, and—well, your uncle came sneaking around and he poured some kind of stuff in my ear, and so—well, so it killed me, so now I’m a ghost, and after that he and your mother got married, so now you got to get after him.”

Mingling with the audience, and also with the actors, after the play, I made myself offensive, telling everybody that plagiarism had taken place. What we’d seen was nothing but Hamlet, I declared. However, nobody knew what I was talking about, not even the manager-author-actor, Johnny Geiger, the fattest boy in Indianapolis, who’d played the avenging son of the ghost. It was openly said that I was jealous: and I openly was, not yet having learned to conceal my viler emotions and knowing myself too clumsy a carpenter to attempt a five-cent Gallery for my own theater.

Box-Office Publicity

A few days later, however, while Jesse James was still in rehearsal, we had a triumph, one that our whole cast felt scored all over Johnny Geiger’s theater. We found ourselves in a newspaper. On the face of it, the item was wholly laudatory. Its writer praised the inspirational seizure upon a recent happy event in the Western border town of St. Jo, Mo., for a drama theme, promised the audience “many a thrill,” gave the cast of characters, and declared that just the scenery, let alone the acting, would be worth anybody’s three cents. Members of our company of players, seeing their names in print for the first time in their lives, glowed with enthusiasm for themselves; and so did I for me—until I read the last sentence for the third or fourth time: “The author of this dramatic chef-d’oeuvre, himself of course to appear in the title role as Jesse James, is Master Newton Booth Tarkington, whose hairs have been whitened by the snows of some thirteen summers.”

Thinking this over, I somehow didn’t quite like it. There appeared to be a covert meaning in that bit about my hairs having been whitened by the snows of thirteen summers, and I didn’t altogether believe in the newspaper’s sincerity. My colleagues, on the contrary, felt that the unexampled publicity assured us a vast audience. Bright boyish souls, they weren’t disappointed when the great afternoon of the single performance arrived and our “box office” amounted to twenty-one cents, all paid by little girls, since every boy of the neighborhood not included in the cast proudly stayed away.

After Page Chapman, as Bob Ford, had shot me in the back with a cap pistol and I’d fallen from the chair and died thumpingly on the floor, the audience remained seated, stupidly expectant of something more, and maybe better, until I had to step forth and ask them if they didn’t have sense enough to know when a play was over, so why on earth didn’t they go home.

First Poem

I had a sense of anticlimax, a feeling that remained with me for some time after the production of this, my first play, which was also my first literary work to be completed. The second, a month or two afterward, had a success that astonished me. I mean a success with other people; I wasn’t astonished when what I did was a success with myself.

I wrote and illustrated something I conceived to be a poem. The two illustrations, in subconscious imitation of most illustrators, weren’t closely related to the text. One was the drawing of a capped-and-belled jester—a popular theme at the time—and he was depicted on a bare hilltop in a tragic posture, careless of the adjacent lightning of a thunderstorm. The other drawing showed him sitting under a tree, quiet, but looking as sad as I could make him look. I bound the two pictures into a little pamphlet, and between them I placed a page of my rhymed meditation:

The Trees

When the soul knows but sadness

No hope and no gladness

Then the soul in its sighing

Finds rest in leaves dying

And shadows of leaves at play.

When the soul knows but sorrow

And the birth of tomorrow

Will bring but the death of today

Turns the soul to the trees

Moving cool in the breeze

Keeping time to the summer’s sigh

Finds rest and finds sadness

But no hope and no gladness

For the Trees answer not

Passion’s cry.

I left this output, as if inadvertently, upon the library center table, and withdrew modestly to the yard, where, lingering beneath an open window of the library, I heard ’ere long a favorable commotion within the house—the two ladies of my family in a state of exclamation. Then my mother came rushing forth, calling me loudly. When I appeared unto her, walking slowly and asking with odious affectation, “Now what’s all the matter?” she fairly shouted over me, embraced me effusively, and took me into the house to read my “poem” to me, and to my congratulatory sister, over and over.

My mother was convinced that it was a poem and that I was a poet and an artist. Never in her fond life had she made such an enraptured fuss over me; her delight was so exorbitant, indeed, that I had almost the grace to blush and to feel the rightful guilt of a person who knows himself overpraised. Her joy of me didn’t end with the moment or the day. She sent copies of my “poem” to kinsfolk near and far, and altogether was so triumphant that now, in retrospect, I wonder! Her sudden and uplifted excitement over “The Trees” seems to indicate a previous lengthy depression during which she must have been fearing that she’d brought something pretty flat into the world.

From that day, I think, she was always a little different with me, and always, even when I brought her grief, treated me as if I contained something precious that must be cherished. I’d just had my thirteenth birthday when I composed the verses that so moved her, and now I had no more opposition to the discarding of knee breeches. Besides long trousers, I was allowed to wear shirts with stiff bosoms, collar buttons, hard cylindrical cuffs, and a ready-made necktie fastened with a buckle, not pins. My collars, from the haberdasher’s, pleased me most. Rigid upright white linen bands, they bore on the inner side of them, distinctly printed, a label: Youth’s First Base. Size 13. I was a youth. My collars said so.

The Marks of a Dude

A new word had begun to appear in the American vocabulary, supplanting “fop,” “swell,” and “dandy.” This word signified the disappearance of an old type of exquisite gentleman and the emergence of a novel creature among us, called the “dude.” The previous sample, the swell, had been given to long Dundreary side whiskers, velvet jackets, loose pantaloons, and wide open collars. The dude was marked particularly by the extreme height of his round white cylinder of a collar, by the spoon-shaped crown of his hard hat, by his razor-pointed shoes, by the flare of the skirts of his Chesterfield black frock coat, by the shortness of his fawn overcoat, and, above all, by such tightness of his trousers that no one could explain how he got his feet through them. It was important, too, that the trousers should show no crease, for a crease disgracefully proved the garment to be a “hand-me-down”—that is, not made by a tailor, but handed down from the shelf of a shop where ready-made clothes were kept folded.

Dudes appeared spontaneously, it seemed, upon the streets of cities all over the country, increasing in numbers just after the commencements of the Eastern colleges. The dudes carried slim, twirly canes and were regarded by the sturdier population as insufferable because of their clothes and because they smoked cigarettes. It was thought permissible for children to prance burlesquingly behind a sample of this new species on the street, squawking, “Yay, come look at the dude! Look at the dude! Look at the dude!”

I didn’t wish to be a dude precisely; I only hoped to be well dressed. My new long trousers were moderate, not skintight, and my Youth’s First Base collars were only an inch high, whereas a true dude’s collar was sometimes thrice that. On the other hand, it’s true I may have taken some pride in feeling that a Youth’s First Base was perhaps a little bit dude-ish, and no doubt my manner became rather self-consciously youthly. Anyhow, I laid myself open to a criticism I received one day from a volunteer.

I was returning from an errand downtown when the converging perspective of the sidewalk revealed in the distance the figures of three boys coming from the opposite direction. Perceiving these to be strangers to me, I had a nervous flutter in the chest and hoped that they would turn into a cross street instead of coming to a near view of me. Most grown men have forgotten and few women ever know, I suppose, what a boy feels when he sees even one other boy, a stranger, approaching on the same side of the street. No more than a dog who sees a strange dog coming does either boy know what is going to happen; and, both with boys and dogs, anything may. Even at thirteen the passage may become an encounter; at the best it will be an embarrassment.

The three approaching figures, three times worse than one, didn’t turn into a side street, and, as they drew nearer, I perceived them to be wholly undude-ish, sturdy fellows and already too much interested in me. Rabbit-minded, I thought of crossing to the opposite sidewalk; but in their look I read that it would be a tactical error, so I came on slowly, frowning as if preoccupied with business computations. When we were almost face to face I courteously made way, gave them the sidewalk, and moved out to the curbstone to pass them; but they impeded me. The smallest of the three placed his distended chest unpleasantly against me.

Of my age, though shorter than I, he was so sternly assured of himself and so iron of morale that even had he lacked the backing of his larger friends he might have been able to impose his will upon me. He had a lumpily modeled face which, as he pressed it upon me, was scarlet with a manly fury. He breathed loudly and his voice loosed the violence of an offended person who knows his right to resent gratuitous injury.

“You listen!” he said. “I can tell all about you by just lookin’ at you and it makes me mad! It’d make this whole town mad just to look at you! You try to be a dude, but you ain’t. You think that’s a dude’s collar, but it ain’t. I wouldn’t even laugh at it! You want to be a dude, but it ain’t in you. Go on home and give up!”

I said nothing; he seemed to be unanswerable, and by no means did I realize that I was having a peculiar experience in which I should have been interested not only as a participant but as an observer. Rarely indeed does anybody come in contact with a critical faculty so roused as to demonstrate to a stranger that his mere outward appearance makes people actually angry.

“Go on home!” the stern boy said, with imperious gestures. “Go on and quit tryin’ to look like somebody. Go on; you hear me? Go home!”

I went, not looking back. I was impaired, vacant inside, and feared that my face, as well as my clothes, offered a too visible stimulant to such estimates of me. Besides this impulsive critic, maybe a whole lot of other people, when they happened to see me, felt a pressure to relieve themselves similarly. Life, it began to seem, could at any moment become startlingly unfavorable. One went about one’s business—which might be no more than to walk absently in the sunshine of a placid day—then suddenly, out of nowhere, there might be in the path something that wanted to bite. The sensations I endured that afternoon were to be many, many times undergone later in my life until what is called “philosophy” should come to the rescue; for, though I then little suspected it, I was to follow one of those callings that of their very nature bring not one but a horde of critics, seemingly out of nowhere, to beset the path indignantly.

“. . . And one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages”; but I think seventy would be truer—if the man live so long—and thirteen and fourteen and fifteen and sixteen and seventeen are among the most ignominious of all the ages.