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As I now examine the flowering of my childhood’s vanity—my natural-born egoism cultivated daily by the flatteries of my parents and my sister—I find that in contact with the similar blossoms of contemporaries my own began to wilt rather early. Sometimes, however, grown people helped on the withering, and at the age of six I’d had a hot afternoon in Terre Haute when adults made the cherished rose of my self-conceit shed petals copiously. That afternoon, in semipublic, so to say, I told a lie of the kind typically used by unimportant human beings for the purpose of presenting an impressive appearance. It’s true, though, that I didn’t myself invent the lie; my Grandmother Booth made me a present of it. She didn’t realize that it was a lie; she thought of it as a convenience and gave it to me because that was the only way to get me to do what she wished.

I was visiting her in Terre Haute and she’d asked me to go forth and buy a needle for her at the largest dry-goods store on the principal business street of the town. I had never been in that store; and to my mind it was a vast emporium, formidable and likely to be contemptuous of a customer of my size and age. When she gave me a copper cent and told me that was the price of a needle I was to buy, I made a great to-do, loudly declining to enter so awesome a bazaar for the purpose of spending a mere penny. I might be held up to ridicule, I protested.

A Penny Tragedy

“Not at all,” my grandmother said. “When the clerk hands you the needle and you give him the penny, just laugh and say, ‘I believe this is the very smallest purchase I ever made in my life!’ That’ll make it all right.”

I thought it would. The ladylike laugh and the little lie seemed plausible. I left the house cheerfully, practicing my contemplated airy laugh as I went. All the way to Main Street I rehearsed, amusedly saying over and over, as I trudged along the hot brick sidewalk, “I believe this is the very smallest purchase I ever made in my life!”

Inside the big store I found my confidence at once enfeebled. The noon hour had just passed; the hotness of the day was that of an Indiana town in a midsummer heat wave, ninety-eight in the shade. I was the only customer in that whole cavern; an interminable avenue stretched before me, bordered by polished wooden counters behind which drooped male and female clerks, languidly waving palm-leaf fans in a daunting silence. I went to the nearest counter, spoke to the whiskered, pallid young man behind it, and faintly told him what I wanted. He stopped fanning himself, yawned, sighed, found the described needle, wrapped it in a wisp of paper, silently handed it to me, and I gave him my copper.

Then, already with a sinking feeling and a voice perhaps somewhat tremulous, I did my practiced laugh for him and said bravely, “I believe this is the very smallest purchase I ever made in my life!”

He leaned across the counter and looked down at me, spoke in a startling voice. “What did you say?”

I was sorry I’d said it and wished not to repeat it, but felt that I had to do so. I omitted the society laugh because I wasn’t able to produce it. “I—I believe this is the very smallest purchase I ever made in my life.”

I desired to leave the place, but couldn’t. This man had a powerful air of not having closed the episode. He looked at the clerks behind the other counters, beckoned, and called their names. “Come here,” he said. “Come listen to this. I want you to hear something.” They came, some gathering about him, behind his counter, and others before it, but all staring down at me. “Sold him a needle for a cent,” he told them. “I want you to hear him talk about it.” Then his unbearably cold and protuberant eyes refixed themselves upon me. “Say it again,” he said. “Say it again.”

The accursed words Grandmother had put into my mouth were by this time loathsome to me; yet I saw no option but to utter them once more. I did, miserably, with my head down and speaking to the floor. “I—I believe this is the very—the very smallest purchase I ever made in my—in my life.”

Here my memory blurs. Of the immediately following moments I recall only the perception that something monstrous was happening to me and that I was presently outdoors upon the hot brick sidewalk again, filled with a horror of life and of myself. I felt that I was a shoddy little fellow exposed; my soul had been shown naked to the world and consisted of weaknesses, falsities, and deformity. I’d been forced to strip before an audience that derisively saw me as I was, a wretched insectile impostor trying to pose as a person of large affairs familiar with important currency—five and ten dollar bills and suchlike!

Our memories acquire dreadful but useful habits. As I walked back to my grandmother’s, millions of locusts seemed to fill the scorching air of all Terre Haute with sizzling, unending proclamations of my shame, hideously letting the world know that I was a cheap snob who’d been showing off—and had got caught at it! Somewhere on that walk I passed a row of catalpa trees. To this hour, sixty-five years later, catalpa trees and the racketing of locusts on a hot day bring back to me Terre Haute at ninety-eight in the shade—and the cure I had of being one special kind of snob.

Our recollections of mortifying scenes in our lives seem to be of ourselves as we were just after those scenes took place. We recall the actual drama itself with a blurring horror; but our sensations immediately afterward often reproduce themselves later with such vividness that we wonder how we could have endured them and gone on living. What burns itself deepest is not the exposure but the crawl home afterward.

The Bridge of Boyhood

In Indianapolis, far downtown in the smoky old and decayed “best residence section,” still stands the house in which I began to discover, at a children’s party, that I was a nonentity. On days when I drive down into the city’s smoke I never pass the place without a painful glance at the window from which I leaped rather than risk having to kiss a beautiful little girl. Nevertheless, my walk home after the party—meditating upon the fact that nobody’d noticed my jump or missed me—remains the sharpest item of that memory too. It was then, at the age of about eight and a half, that I realized something of my cosmic unimportance: I had no weight whatever with anybody, anywhere, except at home.

Transition periods in government or in the life of an individual are the hard ones, and few are more upsetting than the change between being a little child and being a growing boy. I not only had to resign myself to be a nobody among my kind, but, mystified, baffled, and sometimes sore from unpredictable snubbing, I was made to face the fact that I was no longer thought fascinating—or even interesting—by adults, except those of the close family circle. No more at sight of me did every visitor to the house, and every mere caller, set up a caressive powwow and try to coax me nearer. All their previous adulation was gone. The grown-up people I knew had lost the sweet indulgence from their eyes; those eyes didn’t beam at sight of me. Not by wickedness but by the simple process of growing, I had forfeited their love and admiration. For the most part, when their gaze guardedly fell upon me, it expressed a consciousness of being in the presence of something chancy and likely to be objectionable.

A barrier had arisen; I began to feel that almost all grown people were of the opposition; therefore everything had to be concealed from them. Some of them inspired in me a strong uneasiness whenever I saw them.

The General’s Shadow

The one of whom I was most afraid was General Chapman. A principal advantage in the location of the new house we’d built was that it made us closer neighbors of the Chapman family—the general, his lovely wife, whom I’d always called “Auntie Chapman,” and their five small sons, the oldest of whom was no more than a year my senior. The Chapman boys were my most constant playmates. Their mother had a heart that won all children, but the five brothers were somewhat in awe of their father, and I was more so. He’d been an officer of cavalry in the Civil War, and afterward a judge; his eyes, behind the ice of nose glasses, seemed to me disciplinarian and never encouraging. The noisy Chapman house quieted instantly when the general arrived from his law office in the late afternoons; and we of the neighborhood, extraneous noisemakers, went home in a subdued manner. Even in my own front yard, if I was playing there, perhaps with my little gentle old dog, and General Chapman passed by on the sidewalk, I ceased to gambol, felt reproved, and retired with Fritzie to the rear of the house—sometimes slunk into our protective stable to stand brooding there, feeling that I had little right to live.

General Chapman, a kindly man, an old “friend of the family” who’d been one of my father and mother’s wedding party, would have been surprised if he’d known how much I thought about him—“and how”! Grown people, unless they study the matter, have little understanding of the effect they have upon some children. What this patriot, good neighbor, good friend, and able citizen made me feel, merely by the reservedness of his facial expression, was that I ought to be banished from the world. I dreamed about him, dreams of terror, and over and over I planned to make up to myself, someday, for the oppression he put upon me.

This was my plan. The general’s oldest son, George, was, as we say, the image of him; and everyone saw at a glance that when Georgie Chapman grew up he would be exactly like his father in looks and in manner. I wasn’t afraid of Georgie—far from it! I was familiar with him, liked him; I’d several times seen him weep and had even assisted to make him do so. Over and over in my mind I planned a scene that should take place when Georgie became adult, full-grown—forty or fifty, maybe. Georgie would then present to the world precisely the austere appearance that General Chapman did now; but to me he would still be, inside himself, just Georgie Chapman. Inconsistently, in this scene of recompense, I imagined Georgie in the full-sized shell or facsimile of General Chapman; but myself I saw as I still actually was, a boy of nine. I would walk right up to the adult generalesque Georgie, look him full in his nose glasses, give him a push, laugh in loud scorn of his pretensions, and say, “Pooh, you old thing, you! I know you all right! You’re nothing but little old Georgie Chapman. Pooh!”

Thus concretely had I perceived that the child is father to the man, and, meditating upon other boys I knew, saw them in my mind’s eye as they would be when they should be full-grown and changed into members of the adult opposition. I would still know them then and be as intimately familiar with the details of their real characters as I was now; and in this prediction I now seem to have been substantially justified. Boys are likely to comprehend one another’s fundamental characters with a simple clarity—character being more naïvely exposed at that period than later—and adult men who have been “boys together” have a basic knowledge of one another, no matter how they change. After I had grown to manhood, myself, I found that whenever I met a stranger I had an inclination to seek beneath his adult lineaments for the face he’d had when he was a boy. When I can see the boy’s face beneath the man’s I’m fairly sure that I know what sort of person he really is. Meeting General Chapman now for the first time, I’d look for Georgie.

Georgie’s next brother, Launce, also caused me, when I was nine, to make plans for the future. Launce was a carefree strong little boy of whom older people sometimes benevolently said that it was a pleasure to see his animal spirits in action. Usually when they were in action his brothers and I were unhappy. Outdoors he could do everything better than we could, and he could also throw us all down in a heap and jump on us, not caring upon whose face his stout-shod feet landed. He could run, leap, jocosely pull hair, fight, and hurl missiles better than we could; and, laughing heartily, he proved all of this to us whenever he began to feel bored.

Ignominy

He was one of those 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.

Within a month I’d slumped to the bottom of the class. Instructive adults must be both sympathetic and adroit to hold a small boy’s attention, and a child’s ear closes out the words of a person who dislikes him. I felt not the slightest interest in my new studies; I made no effort to comprehend them or anything the new teacher said to us. I was agin the government, a rebel, and daily, almost hourly, recognized as such.

Schoolhouse Ishmael

It seems evident that being a praised pupil, a “teacher’s pet” sort of little boy, had been one of the compensations I’d given myself for my ineptness in sports and for social blows I’d received. Vanity dies hard. It’s a cat of more than nine lives: kill it in the front yard and you find it purring in the cellar. My cellar had been the schoolhouse; but Miss Jeffson had stopped the purring there, and the effect was a long disaster.

Probably it’s dangerously injurious to any human being to brush away, even temporarily, his last shreds of self-conceit—revolutions can rise from it—and the result upon me was an impairment of that still mysterious equipment sometimes called “the nervous system.”

I wasn’t aware of any impairment; I knew only that I felt dull and twitchy and itchy and that batting my eyes, moving the greater part of my nose rapidly in various directions, wobbling my head on its slender neck, and making uncouth sounds afforded brief relief. The trouble was that the more outrageously I did these things, the more extensively I seemed compelled to continue and develop them.

They annoyed Miss Jeffson excessively—she said I was deliberately making faces—and they worried my mother so much that she called in the family physician to look at me. I didn’t see why I was subjected to his scrutiny. Twitchiness had begun to seem to me my natural condition; but after I’d jerked my nose and clucked and glunked at the friendly doctor for a quarter of an hour he withdrew with my mother; and I, listening covertly, heard some murmurings about St. Vitus’s dance that sounded rather attractive.

On the contrary, the doctor prescribed a remedy—“one tablespoonful after each meal”—and when the first of these tablespoonfuls had been inserted, the next day, I could have cursed the hour that I was born, if I’d known how. The medicine was in a quart-sized bottle; poisonous-looking weeds were suspended in a brown liquid, and the ingenuity of a great brain seemed to have exhausted itself in its search for a flavor that should be, of all combinations possible in the universal laboratory, the utmost in repugnance to the human palate. The sense of taste is incomparably more vivacious in children than in adults; my mother, to encourage me by example, was able to swallow a soupçon of this medicine with only a slight leap of her shoulders, while with superb self-control she maintained the strained semblance of a smile upon her face. Three times a day arguments so passionate on my part took place that I wonder she didn’t wholly weary of me.

I had now the medicine at home in addition to ignominies in school and on the playground; so I clucked and glunked, twisted, scratched, jerked, and made more horrible faces than ever. I found that I could flutter my nostrils almost like a rabbit’s and could wiggle my ears so well that their motion could be seen at quite a distance. Miss Jeffson could see it, for instance, the whole length of the schoolroom, and she sometimes grew red rather than ask me again what I meant by it. My troubles approached a climax, and so did Miss Jeffson.

I can’t remember precisely what she said to me one day when, upon her own request, I gave her my honest opinion of a picture; but I know that she used hard words. In the reading class we’d just finished a celebrated poem by James T. Fields—one bit of which is still popularly extant:

“We are lost!” the captain shouted,

As he staggered down the stairs.

Artistic Heresy

Many will remember with pleasure that the captain’s little daughter was present and calmed everybody—and apparently the tempest also—by uttering a few admonitory words; but I didn’t like the poem or the captain or anybody. Under Miss Jeffson I’d become modern before my time, a skeptical analyst, and, above all, an antisentimentalist. The poem said: “Then we kissed the little maiden”; but I was against her; to me she was repellent. I even disliked the illustration in our reader—a woodcut that showed the little maiden taking the captain’s icy hand after he’d staggered down the stairs. It wasn’t a good woodcut. Miss Jeffson called upon me.

“Describe the picture of the captain’s little daughter in the reader.”

“She looks cross-eyed,” I said with dogged accuracy.

The shock to the class was profound. A multitudinously long-drawn whispered “Oh!” filled the room; and then Miss Jeffson summed up and told everybody, and me, the whole of what she really felt about me. I stood, with burning cheeks, rapidly vibrant features, ears working and all. I hated Miss Jeffson, the school, all the pupils, and the captain. Insanely, I hated the little maiden worst of all. Miss Jeffson’s speech about me accomplished nothing of good; I even failed to comprehend that art criticism at the wrong time or in the wrong place is never useful.

I think it was only a few days afterward when in return I gave Miss Jeffson a lesson especially gratifying to myself because it left her with no possible repartee. This was upon a morning when my medicine had agreed with my breakfast rather less than it usually did, and, more and more aware that something was very, very wrong inside me, I sat uneasily at my desk, looking at the two tight pigtails and neatly checked gingham back of the little girl in the seat before me. Sometimes the pigtails seemed to sway and the gingham checks to swirl displeasingly. I put up my hand, and Miss Jeffson frowned at it.

Retort Discourteous

“May I be excused?” I asked thickly.

“You may not.”

I sat for some moments; then put up my hand again. “I’m sick. May I go home?”

“No, you may not.”

“I’d better,” I said, more thickly. ‘I’m getting sicker.”

“That will do!”

Miss Jeffson spoke with such sternness that what had all along been inevitable took place immediately: the genuineness of my illness was proved to her and to everybody. When the convulsion was over I rose, walked up the aisle to the cloakroom door; but paused there—though I could have reached the cloakroom—and had another. All that remained was placed in evidence. Then, over the turned and interested heads of my colleagues, I wanly gave Miss Jeffson a look that said, “There! How about that? You believe it now, don’t you?”

Not a little pleased with myself, I floundered home and was put to bed.

It’s not easy to say just when children reach the age of class reticence; but it’s certain that sometimes the most sympathetic parents in the world can’t overcome a child’s withholdings. A small boy in particular usually wishes to avoid evoking an interfering sympathy and is embarrassed by tender condolences. I didn’t tell my parents about my troubles with Miss Jeffson. I didn’t myself understand that she was really what was the matter with me or, of course, that I was just a bit of machinery and she the wrong mechanic to operate it. I didn’t and couldn’t explain; and so my mother and my father and the doctor, after medicating me and achieving no results except anguish three times a day, were seriously puzzled. They came to one of the strangest conclusions I’ve ever known intelligent people to reach: they decided that I was studying too much, working too hard in school. I was sent to visit my grandmother.

On a shelf of the whatnot in Grandmother Booth’s front parlor, in Terre Haute, there was a dried brown plant from the South Seas. On the whatnot it looked a little like a wooden spider the size of a small tomato; but if you put it in a soup bowl full of water it swelled out until it filled the bowl. At the age of ten, after you’d done that at Grandmother Booth’s, there wasn’t anything else to do except to go out and watch the ants on the front walk. However, for the higher type of recreation, there was a library; and in the evenings my grandmother talked interestingly upon the four subjects that absorbed her: Carlyle, Emerson, Robert G. Ingersoll, and the French Revolution. Grandfather Booth, eighty-seven and almost always deep in gentle reverie, seldom spoke.

I was supposed to be leading a very quiet life and not to think about school; I led the quiet life all right, and didn’t think about school. After several weeks my grandmother decided that I needed to be brightened up; she invited the daughter of an old friend of hers to come and spend a day at play with me.

Little Isabel was a fat, friendly little girl, briskly talkative, and I didn’t dislike her. On the other hand, I didn’t like her either. We were given a room upstairs to sit down and play in, but Isabel didn’t know any games for two and neither did I. Isabel, polite, chatted and chatted, while a longing came over me to go away from her; but I was sure that wherever I went she’d feel it her duty as my guest to go with me. Older people find such problems complicated, requiring delicate handling, but a boy of ten can’t be trusted not to solve them with a primordial and atrocious simplicity. I went to an open window, pointed out of it, and said eagerly, “Look, Isabel!”

Isabel came to the window and asked, “Where?”

I pointed to the grass below. “Right down there!”

Isabel leaned out of the window. I retired into the hall, locked the one door of the room that contained good little Isabel, who still looked out of the window. Then I put the key in my pocket, descended the stairs, and strolled out to the street. There, experiencing a sense of relief and freedom, I decided upon a real excursion. I went all the way to the Wabash River at the edge of town, threw pebbles into the water, and enjoyed the landscape. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

Finally, though, I thought of Isabel again. Maybe she was getting tired of that room by this time and she might be hungry too. It struck me that she ought to be let out. It was a long walk back and I was tired, myself, when I reached grandmother’s house, but I found the place more excited than restful.

Whining Schoolboy

Good little Isabel’s manners were so excellent that she hadn’t made a really important uproar until more than an hour of her seclusion had passed. When I arrived, her mother had been sent for, and she and my grandmother and my grandfather and my Uncle Lucius were trying to comfort Isabel through the door, upon which a noisy and inefficient locksmith was working baffledly. Isabel’s mother was very kind: she just said I seemed to be a strange sort of boy, and took the precaution of leading Isabel home at once. Grandmother Booth was kind, too, but often looked at me speculatively after that. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking, but her expression made it plain that she was thinking.

I came home to Indianapolis still bullfrogging in my throat, exercising my nose, and doing talented things with my scalp and my ears; so I was kept on vacation. In the autumn, being now eleven, I went back to school; but I’d of course dropped behind. My former class was a full year ahead of me and I found myself to be again without any interest whatever in education. I had another teacher, a pleasant one; but felt no ambition to shine before her or before anybody. School had become drudgery and confinement; I held a low opinion of it and of myself. Then, one day of that September, I had a flash of aggrandizement and once more, as in my infancy, was able to look upon Master Newton Booth Tarkington as a great person.

The revelation of beauties within me took place at the Indiana State Fair. One of the younger Chapman boys and I had saved up for the fair, and were permitted by our mothers to set forth early in the morning to spend the whole day together among agricultural machines, prize hogs, poultry, cattle, vegetables, fruit, side shows, balloon ascensions, dangerous edibles, trotting races, and dusty crowds. Page and I felt opulent, for, in addition to the lunch our mothers had provided for us, I think we each possessed about sixty-five cents, pure spending money.

Encounter with Life

We spent it more hurriedly than we intended. By noon we’d seen everything, contained candy, peanuts, popcorn, gingerbread, cider, lemonade, were broke, and ate our lunches languidly. After that we listened to barkers, saw two balloons rise from crowds we couldn’t penetrate; and then for a long time believed we were watching the races because we were looking at the backs of people over whose shoulders we caught infrequent glimpses of horses’ ears and drivers’ gaudy caps flitting by.

When we’d conscientiously stayed through the last race, Page and I were separated in the departing throngs, and didn’t find each other again. The afternoon was waning, dim autumnal sunset came on; but I wandered through the thinning crowd, scuffing the littered ground, dog-tired, yet not content to be upon my homeward way. There must be something more to see, I thought, something that Page and I had overlooked; and after a while, in a remote part of the fairgrounds, I found it.

It was a strange vehicle, four-wheeled but smallish. Upon the underpinning there was a sort of little house with glass windows, and the windows had neat little lace curtains. Between the curtains was seen a bed—a bed with a clean white coverlet, white bolster, and pillows—and the bed and the lace curtains were all that the little house contained. Moreover, the contraption was not intended to be drawn by a horse. A peculiar man, the owner of the little house, stood between the narrow shafts and, with straps over his shoulders and across his chest, was showing a small crowd of loiterers how he traveled, pulling the vehicle, his home, with him from fair to fair and town to town, he said.

He was a wild-looking man, I thought. His black clothes were tattery; the brim of his old black slouch hat blew back from his unkempt long black hair; he had a ragged black beard; and the whites of his eyes could be seen from an unusual distance. He spoke with an appealing earnestness; though I couldn’t hear what he said, because, after I’d looked into his house between the little curtains, something about the owner and his manner embarrassed me, not for myself but for him; and I withdrew to a slight knoll perhaps a hundred feet away. I stood and watched, fascinated yet unwilling to be closer.

The man stepped out of his harness, stood forth, and I comprehended that he was lecturing, so to call it, to the people about him. With great rapidity and that serious eagerness he seemed to be talking about himself, his travels, and his odd little house. I got the impression that he wasn’t quite right in his head, and I saw that his closer listeners thought this, too, and it amused them. They were increased in number until there were perhaps fifty or sixty of them, men and boys, all laughing; and the more earnest he became, the more they laughed.

He addressed them with a greater and greater vehemence; his gestures became fantastic, and the crowd about him shouted with mirth. He wasn’t angry with them; what he said, so far as I could know, was in the nature of passionate appeal, as if he begged for justice. Then he passed his hat among the crowd, while the laughter grew, and, when he examined what had been put into the hat, I saw that he was in great pain and disappointment; for he turned the hat upside down and sadly emptied it of its contents—peanut shells, tobacco quids, and apple cores. The jokers howled, and he began all over again, trying to prove that he and his house were worth his tormentors’ patronage and support.

They constantly interrupted him with cheering. The more he urged his case upon them, the louder they mocked him. Young louts among them flicked pebbles at him, tossed gobs of earth upon him, and, when he paused to wipe the dirt from his face, were in ecstasy. They knocked off his hat, and, when he patiently returned it to his head, daring ones rushed in, shoved him about, and manhandled him. He went on with his speech.

Standing on my knoll in the growing dusk, I watched and thought that my heart must break for that poor man. If I hadn’t spent all my money I would have given it to him; I would have given him everything I had. I couldn’t lift my voice against the cruel crowd that persecuted him; I didn’t know how. It seemed to me that I would give my life to aid this bullied poor creature, but I was as helpless as he. All I could do was to stand there, wrung through my vitals with an agony of pity and tenderness for anyone so oppressed. I felt that of all those who participated in the dreadful spectacle only the victim himself and I were good and would go to heaven—and with this thought, though then I knew it not, the devil tempted me and I fell.

My whole small person filled with self-esteem. I felt that the all-seeing Deity was personally looking down upon me with a sublime approval and that, although I couldn’t be of any use to the badgered creature before me, heaven would bless me for being the only person present with a noble heart. It seemed to me that God and the poor wild man and I were brought close together spiritually by my own goodness and that the three of us made a lonely light upon this earth.

Darkness was coming on deeper, and I walked away. When I left, the crowd still harried the unfortunate man; but I trudged homeward exalted. Never before—and I pray heaven never since—did I so praise myself. The supremacy of my virtue wrought a pathos about me; my holiness touched me to the quick. Lamplighters trotted whistling up the long streets, setting their slim ladders against the iron poles, then touching the glass boxes at the top into yellow illumination; and I passed beneath the lights with my hands in my pockets and my head down, my eyes wet with self-appreciation. I still felt excruciatingly sorry for the poor wild man; but the sorrier I was for him, the more credit I gave myself for it. I wept for him, and my tears were tribute to the just-discovered angelic quality of my own character. I was so good I just couldn’t bear it.

At home, when they asked me what I’d seen at the fair, I couldn’t tell them about my unhappy friend—or about me. I murmured of a Spotted Wild Boy in a side show, and went to my room to be alone with my sorrow and my perfection.

I was pretty much over it next day and just a dub again, but for grandeur of soul I’d made a great reputation with myself.