Читать книгу America Moved - Booth Tarkington - Страница 9

Aged eleven, I was sometimes vaguely disturbed by hearing older people speak of what the world might be like in faraway times to come; though I’d accepted a prophecy that my own future was limited to the next nine years. I was to die that young.

At the beginning of the 1880s long fly brushes, sometimes beautifully of peacocks’ feathers, were waved over dining-room tables at mealtimes in warm weather; doors and windows had no fly screens then; and on a summer morning a swallow flew into our kitchen. Finding all doors open to encourage the breeze, the confused bird flew out of the kitchen and across a rear hallway into the library, darted aside through the drawing room, shot leftward into the front parlor, then dipped through the hall and out to the sunshine again by way of the open front doorway. Immediately there was great commotion within the house; my mother and sister couldn’t quiet our convulsively noisy fat colored cook.

“Sign o’ death!” she shouted. “Bird fly threw house true sign o’ death!” She pointed at me. “It’s him! Sign o’ death fer that chile. He ain’ go’ live to grow up. That chile never go’ live see twenty-one years ole! Bird done say so!”

My mother and sister of course laughed and reassured me; but the cook and the swallow made an impression upon me—I thought that most likely they knew. However, years were so long—in those days—that a possible nine of them, stretching ahead, offered a virtually interminable lifetime. I wasn’t much more bothered than if the cook had said I wouldn’t live to be a hundred; and I felt rather important because the swallow’s performance, and hers, were all about me.

Convinced that I’d never see twenty-one, I was, nevertheless, attentive when older people spoke of what I might see if I lived to be an old man. My grown-up relatives talked of times even farther ahead than that—especially when Uncle Newton stopped to visit us on his journeys between Washington and California. He laughed at himself for being a visionary, but insisted that someday carriages would move without horses to pull them, and he was even fantastic enough to believe that within the next hundred years or so men would fly. People would see them—actual human beings like ourselves—way up there in the sky and not just helplessly floating in balloons, but with made wings, dodging the clouds and as sure of themselves as birds are. He thought, too, that someday there’d be light from electricity, and hotels would no longer have to put up bedroom signs for country people, “Don’t blow out the gas.”

Few of his kinsfolk could seriously agree with him about men flying; though they all accepted the theoretical possibility that carriages and phaetons and buggies could be made to move, lacking horses. The thing might be done by means of steam engines stoked with coal, they thought; but the machines would always have to be kept off the public highways, of course, because they’d frighten the horses.

Such inventions, it was felt, wouldn’t be practical until the millennium, that Utopian era to arrive when everybody had become well-to-do, all-wise, and wholly good. By then all problems, including that of swift transportation, would have been solved, so we’d all live in a leisure devoted to literature, the fine arts, and religious observances. There would of course be no more war—but my mother was positive that already mankind had learned at least that one dreadful lesson. As a girl she’d lived through the Mexican War and as a young matron through the incomparably more heart-rending Civil War; she was sure that nothing so horrible as war could ever happen again. Perhaps this was why my father’s sword and a great-grandfather’s Revolutionary musket were kept in the attic, where I used them fiercely in many solitary wars against invisibles.

Thus I may have been in myself a demonstration that war wasn’t extinct; for doesn’t a child’s life repeat the history of his species, and aren’t most nations still controlled by child instincts? My father, gentlest of men, didn’t think the world old enough to be free of war. In fact, he thought it possible that life on this planet might become so torn with fighting that a man would be safest as a trained soldier; so his plan for me was West Point—an idea always quietly but emotionally opposed by my mother.

My father’s thought that war would come again he founded upon observation of the world and upon reason, of course; but he had also developed a queer idea. It was a fancifully speculative one, he admitted, and he didn’t believe in it—he was always discriminating in his use of the word “believe”—yet he thought the thing could be possible. In the unbounded range of his reading he’d included many books upon the esoteric philosophies; he corresponded with an English expert upon the Law of Karma, and he thought the doctrine of reincarnation so plausible that a quarter of a century later, after an Italian sojourn, he wrote his piquant book upon the question, The Hermit of Capri. In that work, however, he didn’t mention the odd bit of looking forward militarily that made me shiver once or twice in my boyhood.

The thought was that terrific hordes of the disembodied entities of ancient fighting men—Carthaginian mercenaries, Roman legionaries, turbulent Alamanni, and what not—had perhaps already been reincarnated, some of them killing their way across Asia and into Europe with Genghis Khan maybe, and that the Law of Karma seemed to indicate that they were just about due in quantity upon this earth again. Great numbers of them, he thought, might be born into various nations during the next fifty years—many might already be alive—and, as they were in very essence savage warriors, their presence among mankind would so tend to create prodigious wars that the efforts of civilized peacemakers would be of little avail. The disturbances would not be calculable nor could the world go peacefully forward again until the truculent had been destroyed and the wave of this incarnation of theirs had passed.

The Golden Age

Thus, to me, the far future seemed uncomfortable to think about—with its shadowy crowds of terrible warrior souls fighting, and its skies meteored with winged people flying, and its tooting steamy vehicles frightening horses and ponies into runaways—but, naturally, I didn’t think about it often or for long. The younger we are, the more vivaciously we’re engaged with every present instant, and, for that matter, we were then all living in the Golden Age, though we didn’t know it. We never know such things till afterward, and, as my father pointed out, we seldom say, “I am happy!” though we often look back and say, “I was happy then.”

The happy world I lived in as a boy enjoyed the earlier years of a long period of peace for our country, and an enlightened civilization was advancing without having yet become elaborately mechanized. We could have got along pretty well, indeed, without any machinery at all, unless such things as a pump handle, a water-turned mill wheel, or the blade of a plow are to be called machinery. So far as machinery was concerned, my four grandparents, heartily alive throughout my boyhood, had grown up in a world that was almost the same as that of Julius Caesar. In their youth, ships could better sail into the wind than Roman ships could, and of course there was gunpowder; but virtually they lived in machineless country and were the sturdier and happier for the self-reliance and consequent independence of life and thought thus granted them.

I was not quite so fortunate. In my childhood, telegraph poles increasingly defaced the landscape, and on the new railroads we could go to almost any part of the country without changing cars at every junction. When I was eleven, the telephone here and there began to be in use—most likely between a mill in the country and its office in town—but abject dependence upon machinery hadn’t arrived, nor, all in all, had the complete change from the youthful life of my grandparents. How dizzied we’d all have been could we have looked forward accurately into this age of then unbelievable machines and incredible speeds—and, despite my father’s queer idea, with how crazy an optimism we’d have guessed what the effect of the machines and the speeds would be!

Crisis at Greencastle

At eleven, however, my real concern with the future being for the immediate one, I was little more altruistic about it than I’d been in my infancy; the self-centeredness of a boy is almost equal to a baby’s. Yet at this period I had two sharp anxieties about the health of two grown-up persons, one of whom I’d never seen. The other one was my Uncle George Ames.

I didn’t know Uncle George very well—he was my mother’s sister’s husband—and I was aware of him only as a handsome, gray-bearded, religious-looking man whom I didn’t see often, as he lived forty miles away at Greencastle. Nevertheless, that summer, when I heard that Uncle George was dangerously ill, I began to worry about him acutely because Adam Forepaugh’s Mammoth Circus was approaching Indianapolis and I thought that if anything very bad happened to Uncle George it was almost sure to interfere. I had a nervous week; every day the circus got nearer and Uncle George got worse.

The circus was for Saturday, and on Friday morning a telegram came; Uncle George had died. My father understood what I felt, and on Saturday after lunch, without saying anything about it to my mother, took me to the circus anyhow. I wondered a little if he was doing quite right by Uncle George; but I trusted him to know best and had a glorious afternoon. At the very entrance to the circus my father introduced me to Adam Forepaugh himself—he looked a little like Uncle George, I thought—and I had a full sack of popcorn to look at the animals with. We sat in splendid reserved seats with backs to them and even stayed for the concert after the Grand Performance.

At the concert I was transported when a little girl and a boy in white knee breeches appeared upon the distant platform, singing and dancing in a golden light. I paid no attention to the boy, the little girl so stirred me. I knew that the ballet-skirted bareback riders I’d seen flying through hoops were not little girls—they were specialized and sexless creatures, pretty but not recognizable as human beings exactly—but this little girl with the spangled knee-length pink dress, the jumping amber curls upon her shoulders, and the twinkling slippers that clinked and tinkled as she danced, seemed to me a transfigured sample of what one might actually meet at a children’s party—a children’s party almost in fairyland perhaps. For me to imagine her as probably nearer thirty than eleven was beyond the range of thought. The sparkling little dress exposed her pink silk legs, and female human legs weren’t visible or even known about except when they belonged to little girls.

Grown-up ladies who walked as if they didn’t have any were thought the most graceful, and I seldom saw even their whole feet. I’d had what I thought was an argument about legs with a schoolmate, a boy who told me one day that in older circles legs were highly regarded. I scoffed at him, but he maintained his point. “Grown-up men think a whole lot about legs,” he insisted. “It’s why they get in love and get married.”

I laughed at him loudly. “They do not!”

“They do, too!” He was of German parentage and obstinate. “Men like fat legs. They’ve got to be fat or they won’t pay any attention. The bigger women’s legs are, the worse the men want to marry ’em. My Cousin Emil got married to Cousin Gertrude because she’s got the biggest legs in Indianapolis.”

“Then he’s crazy,” I said. “And so are you. Men marry somebody they think’s got a pretty face. They don’t get married on account of legs or elbows or knuckles or anything like that; and even if they wanted to, how could they tell what kind of legs they are?”

“That’s easy,” Albert informed me. “When they’re getting in a streetcar or a buggy or something they can see whether they’re big or not. Then if they’re big enough they get married to them.”

I didn’t want to get married to the beautiful little girl dancing and singing enchantingly upon the circus concert platform; the exposure of her legs only proved that she truly was a little girl, and the charms that tingled into my heart from her were her flopping curls, her brilliant rose-and-white complexion, her clicky slippers, and the piercing silver voice with which she sang, “Oh, I’m happy, yes, as happy as can be!”

Almost all of the little girls I knew roused in me a feeling of annoyance, particularly those in my sister’s Sunday-school class when she had them come to our house for games and cake and lemonade. I was so bitter with them that once when one of them triumphed in argument with me by throwing my new straw hat over the fence, and I could obtain no redress from either my sister or my mother, I decided to run away from home—and did, for as much as two hours. This song-and-dance little girl, transcendently different, sweet, and glittering, was a beautiful revelation. I had dazzling fancies. Sometime, somehow, in a world apart, maybe she would perpetually sing and dance and I would forever look and listen.

Tribal Experience

On the train to Greencastle, next day, with my mother, I heard the car wheels clicking “Oh, I’m happy, yes, as happy as can be!” and amber curls ethereally bounced on spangled pink shoulders in my mind’s beglamoured eye; but when we arrived at Uncle George’s house and saw the solemn crape upon the front door, I was all interest in the tribal experience for the first time awaiting me. Figures in black moved hushedly about the house; the smell of tuberoses was powerful, and in the parlor there was Uncle George, stately, in his open coffin, waiting for his funeral on the morrow.

My mother was taken upstairs to my widowed aunt and her daughters; I was left alone—and presently, for a few moments, alone with Uncle George. I looked at him earnestly and became aware that he was not there; that the figure in the coffin was not a person at all. Out of curiosity, and with no other feeling whatever, I touched the chill forehead and at once found my investigative forefinger distasteful. Then, as people in black came softly into the room, whispering appropriate lamentations, I stepped out of the side door and into the big sunshiny yard.

There was an orchard behind the house, and, walking slowly with my head bent in imitation of the people I’d seen indoors, I went to stand mournfully beneath the apple trees. I looked as sorrowful as I possibly could, in case anybody should glance from a window; and I was startled when my Cousin George, Uncle George’s son, not long out of college, came briskly from the house and called in a cheerful voice, “Hello! How’s young Boothie?”

I’d heard that he and his father had never been very congenial; nevertheless, I was shocked by Cousin George’s lively manner. I thought his naturalness misplaced—the wrong etiquette for the occasion—and, during the short talk we had about our health and the weather, I didn’t let him divert me from what I believed my plain duty as a funeral guest. I kept my face mournful and spoke in a low voice, mainly monosyllables, trying to seem on the verge of breaking down completely with my grief for Uncle George.

This was my manner throughout the day and evening, and during the obsequial ceremonies of the next day. A stranger seeing me might have thought I’d been closer to Uncle George than almost anybody’d been. I was sure this was the effect called for, and, as I came prominently forth from the house, a member of the mourning family, to go to the cemetery, I saw respectful spectators in the yard and on the sidewalk and wished that the transcendent rose-and-gold little circus girl could see me then. In my thoughts she occupied almost as large a place as I did, myself, at Uncle George’s funeral.

The other grown person—the one I didn’t know—for whom my boyish anxieties became acute was the President of the United States, General Garfield. Every year, with the Chapman family, two branches of the Hendrickses, and half a dozen other neighborly intimates, we had a Fourth of July we dreamed about—the sylvan games, bosky wanderings, and rare foods of an all-day picnic in the woods far out of town —and for the children of this association of old friends the Fourth meant the rose-lighted festival of all the year. On the second of the month that year the President was shot down by an assassin. Trying to act the man, I asked my parents as calmly as I could if the picnic would have to be given up.

Grave, they said, yes, of course; there couldn’t be any kind of Fourth of July celebration anywhere unless the surgeons in Washington should decide the next day that General Garfield was going to get well. I wasn’t one solitary little monster; every boy I saw on the third of July was as passionately hopeful as I that those doctors in Washington would issue the right kind of bulletins, no matter what. But the eve of the Fourth came, no preliminary rockets hissed up over the housetops, and the nation was in gloom. Late on the morning of the Fourth the news became more encouraging: the President had a chance; and after hesitant consultations it was decided that there were to be no firecrackers, but to the great question—the picnic—the answer at last was yes.

Noon had passed before the family carriages came lurching one by one through the green woods, and immediately the baskets were unpacked and the long white tablecloths laid upon the grass. An hour later, partly gorged, the boys all instinctively withdrew themselves far from the elders and maidens of the tribe; we ran yelping and chasing one another through the woodland until we were securely distant, out of earshot, and had found a stream. Upon its bank we gathered in a chattering clump; a thing forbidden was revealed.

Woodland Casualty

One of us, an adventurous boy, Chase Walker, had it—a pistol. He had blank cartridges, too—he’d not been able to acquire any with bullets, though he’d tried—but he showed us how he could shoot at a mark just the same.

He took small pebbles from the edge of the little creek, pushed them into the muzzle of the pistol, and, with the unsharpened end of a lead pencil, rammed down a wad of paper after them. For a target he fastened a torn bit of newspaper against the rough bark of a tree; then, retiring a few feet, fired and proudly showed two or three holes in the paper made by the pebbles.

He was generous, let all of us shoot pebbles at the mark until he and we found the sport monotonous and tired of it. We waded in the stream, caught crawdads, discovered a deep hole, and went swimming. We sunburned ourselves upon a sandbank, held our heads under water, and clinked stones together to see how much it made our ears hurt; we rioted waterily till the length of our thin shadows on the sandbank made us think of spicy foods again. It would be picnic suppertime soon. Chase Walker, sitting on a large rock at the edge of the sandbank, fired his pistol at a sapling; then reloaded it with pebbles, cocked it to shoot again, but decided that he’d better begin dressing instead.

People sometimes say, “It’s a wonder any boy ever lives to grow up!” and, remembering how many times I was near drowning, what weeds, roots, and wild berries I tried to find edible, and how often I just saved myself on roofs, though I was the least daring of my kind, I think there’s something in the saying. Chase Walker sat on his rock, dabbling his feet in the water and preparing a pebble-loaded pistol to be carried in his pocket. With the muzzle resting upon his bare leg, as he sat, he held the hammer back with his thumb and pressed the trigger. The hammer should have been restrained by his thumb, but wasn’t; the pistol uttered its sharp report—and there was Chase staring, mystified, at a nasty red-and-black spot just above his right knee. Then his face was contorted and he began to whimper a little.

“What can I do?” he said.

We couldn’t tell him; he appeared to be ruined and already we were thinking of something else. Nothing was more severely forbidden to every one of us than to have anything to do with a pistol; and, now that Chase had shot himself with one, our alarm—for ourselves—was acute. It gave us, too, a distaste for Chase; but we helped him to tie a wet handkerchief round his leg and to get into his clothes. Then, after several trials and collapses, he found that he could progress hobblingly and we set forth.

For a while some of us lingered scaredly along in the rear with Chase; but when we began to hear distant adult shouts calling us to the picnic supper, the first law of Nature asserted itself. Already the two or three youngest, and therefore most instinctive, were far ahead. Scattering ourselves—every boy for himself—we arrived singly in the glade where our elders and the maidens sat upon the grass, feasting.

We found our places quietly, very quietly; said nothing unless spoken to and carefully didn’t look at one another. Seated, we ate slowly—until all of us paused in both eating and breathing when Chase Walker’s mother asked a natural question. “Wasn’t Chase with the rest of you? Where is he?”

“Where?” I repeated. “Chase? Well—I think he must be coming. I think I saw him walking along behind us somewhere back in the woods. I mean I think I did.”

Somebody said, “Yes, there he is, Mrs. Walker,” and Chase emerged from a thicket, bravely limping only a little.

“I fell and bumped my knee,” he explained, as he contrived to let himself down upon the grass beside the white cloth. “My goodness, mother, don’t make a fuss over my just tripping on a root and falling down!”

Mrs. Walker was reassured and the gay chatter of the elders and maidens resumed. Chase ate in a natural manner, and the rest of us preserved the kind of still expressionlessness that always ought to be investigated when boys wear it.

Fool’s Paradise

Now the last sunshine had faded from the tops of the trees; the horses were harnessed; and, singing “Good night, ladies, we’re going to leave you now,” the families all piled themselves into the carriages. The boys contributed little to the song; but, as I jogged sleepily back into the town in the dusty dusk, my anxiety evaporated. Obviously, the episode was closed. General Garfield had been shot, but we’d had our picnic; and Chase Walker had shot himself, but nobody knew it—that is, nobody who’d do anything disagreeable about it. Everything was all right.

The next day at noon, however, I had bad moments. The Pennsylvania Street streetcar, drawn by one mule with a bell hung round its neck, stopped before our house, and my mother got out, looking serious.

“There’s sad news for you,” she said as I came to the gate to meet her. “A terrible thing happened at the picnic yesterday.”

“Did it?” I contrived to ask. “You mean something happened that—that nobody knew about?”

“Yes, to Chase Walker. I’ve just come from their house. The poor boy had a pistol and he loaded it with some pebbles and accidentally shot them into his knee. Don’t you remember when he came to supper he was late and limping, and said he’d fallen down and hurt himself?”

“Did he?” I said. “Well—I think I remember he was limping or something.”

“The most dreadful part of it,” my mother went on, “was that he didn’t tell anybody, and it was almost midnight when his mother and father thought they heard him groaning in his sleep, and went to see and found that he was in a high fever and delirious.

The doctor’s afraid Chase has blood poisoning, and he’s very, very sick. Isn’t it dreadful?”

The Male Animal

I said yes, it was; but felt that it had been dreadful only while I feared she knew I’d been present when Chase shot himself. She seemed gratifyingly innocent not to suspect me; I didn’t perceive the inability of a grown person even to imagine that any boy at the picnic—much less all of us—had known the truth about Chase and not instantly sped for adult help to save him. My sensations were of sweet relief; and in this, again, I was not uniquely monstrous. With other boys of the picnic party I joined, that afternoon, in lighthearted sports. Chase had correctly given all adults the impression that he’d been alone when he hurt his knee; and now he was pretty sick, but nobody else was in any trouble at all.

We weren’t even grateful to Chase for not incriminating us; we simply dismissed the affair from our minds, and, when Chase palely appeared among us again, some weeks later, neither he nor we more than briefly referred to it. In our whole procedure there appears to be a suggestion that the germs of unwritten and unspoken gangster law reside in the very nature of even the well-brought-up boy. If, however, the episode might seem to show forth human young male animals as lacking all capacity for sympathy, the deduction would be faulty.

With alarmed egoism not in the ascendant, any one of that group of boys could be—though perhaps secretly—as tender as a mother. My own sympathies sometimes kept me busy for hours at a time. I injuriously did my loving best with glue to repair a butterfly with a broken wing; I earnestly dosed and tended sick cats, and adopted, fed, and cherished a blind lost dog. Four newborn she-pups condemned by a neighbor to drown I begged of him and tried faithfully, in spite of jeering criticism, to raise on the bottle. I surreptitiously took large old gray rats from our cook’s trap in the cellar, kept them in a straw-filled box in the stable until they made their escape; then I worried about what would happen to them without my care and the regular three meals a day I’d been giving them. My usually impractical sympathies seem to have extended themselves so unduly, indeed, that I fear I may have been, after all, a sentimental boy.

By the end of July that summer, I was twelve and busy with the imitation of a classic—or at least ancient—dramatic work. I turned to it perhaps because I was a helpless duffer in both the minor and the major sports. I did no better with “mumble-peg” or jackstones or jackstraws than with baseball or marbles or kite flying; but I found that I could, however ineptly, carve and color wood into grotesque faces. Over the country, dime museums were beginning to be the precursors of ten-twenty-and-thirty theatrical entertainments; and at the new Indianapolis Dime Museum I’d been enraptured by a Punch-and-Judy show. I made one, myself, and had a neighborhood success with it; admission, ten pins.

Without difficulty I produced the peculiar vocalizings required by the antique drama; I improvised dialogue, embroidered the story, and provided my wooden-beaded actors with squeaked bits of song and recitative of my own composing. Something of the real showman being within me, I gave as many as three performances in a single afternoon to much the same audience, with mercenary intermissions while its members went home for more pins. To me, the accumulated pins, hoarded in a pasteboard box, mystically represented wealth, and it wasn’t until I went upon a vacation visit that my Punch-and-Judy show was offered to the public for genuine money.

Where I went was to a little town that was a boy’s sheer heaven. “Loveliest village of the plain,” it lay in Illinois just beyond the Indiana border, an emeraldine jewel of a midland county seat in the earliest 80’s: old brick courthouse in the shady green square; stamping and switching farmers’ teams hitched all day to the courthouse fence; monosyllabic loafers draped elsewhere upon this fence, whittling a little between reveries; stores sleeping in the sun all round the square; and Main Street stirless dust, except when a dust whirlwind flipped up from it to dance a moment in the sunshine. All the boys in Marshall went barefoot throughout the summer; meadows, woods, creeks, and old covered bridges were within a hop, skip, and jump from anywhere; nobody hurried and everybody seemed to know everybody else amusedly and without severity.

Marshall meant unhampered life and open country to me, a city boy; but also I had there, in my Uncle Lyman’s commodious house, the companionship of two boys, my first cousins, the younger of whom, Fenton, was almost precisely my own age. Fenton Booth was a jolly boy given to laughter, mock speechmaking, and an unendurable kind of singing that sometimes upset me into such fits of fury as to delight his soul. On an earlier visit to Marshall, he’d provided me with the one moment in my life when I was in a condition to attempt the murder of a fellow being, and did attempt it.

For hours indoors I’d been modeling a head out of a great wad of putty and paying no attention to Fenton’s many shouted appeals to stop my senseless dabbing and come out and play. Finally he skipped in and, as I happened to turn my back, rushed upon the almost completed work of art that had so long absorbed me, and obliterated it instantaneously; only shapelessness remained. I flew at him, but he sped away, singing tauntingly:

“Oh, remember while you’re young

That the days to you will come

When you’re old and only in the way!”

He was still singing when he reached the sunshiny village street and I found a brickbat in the dust. Cackling loudly his taunting song, he turned his head to laugh at me over his shoulder and wasn’t ten feet from me when with all my force I threw the brickbat straight at his merry face. He hadn’t thought me murderous, didn’t believe I’d throw, but ducked a little anyhow, and one jagged edge of the brickbat passed swiftly through his hair. If he hadn’t moved his head at all it’s probable that an exalted judicatory body, the United States Court of Claims, in Washington, would subsequently have operated for many years under a less distinguished Chief Justice. The space of half an inch saved the life of a future personage, and proved to me that an artist, even when interrupted in his full passion of creation, shouldn’t be too natural.

Fenton and I both looked at the brickbat where it lay guiltily in the dust, and before long he was able to sing again; but I stayed frightened about myself. I didn’t go back to my wad of putty.

Two years later, when we were twelve and I came on this midsummer visit to Marshall, Fenton had become a journalist. His father had given him a printing press and the use of a small vacant warehouse. There, with village-boy subordinates, he had established a newspaper, The Early Bird, two cents a copy; and in Indianapolis I had received and admired a sample of every previous week’s issue. Fenton wouldn’t allow me to unpack my trunk, he was so eager to show me The Early Bird newspaper office, and himself and his subeditors, who were also printers, in action. When we got there, though, I was somewhat dashed.

Across the middle of the floor, from one end wall to the other, ran an old wooden balustrade, apparently to exclude the public—and the public, I learned at once, consisted of me. On the other side of the balustrade, Fenton and his assistants immediately busied themselves with the printing press, with their desks, pencils, and paper, shouting crisp orders at one another, setting up an elaborate professional bustle, and leaving me to contemplate a pasteboard sign, keep out, hung over my side of the balustrade! Without knowing it, I was filling the function of audience, and the efforts I made to become something better weren’t encouraged. When finally, leaning plaintively over the railing, I asked if I couldn’t even be elected or appointed one of the newsboys to deliver the paper to subscribers, nobody seemed to hear me. Then, as I persisted, I was requested not to make so much noise.

“Can’t you see we’re awful busy here?” Fenton said. “We got to get our paper out day after tomorrow, don’t we? You get to look on, don’t you? My goodness!”

When suppertime came, six o’clock in Marshall, I was still the public and, as we walked home, responded but feebly to Fenton’s bright descriptions of editorial life. The next morning, however, he helped me to finish unpacking my trunk and surprised me by becoming warmly interested when I removed therefrom the dramatis personae of Punch and Judy.

“My goodness, Boothie! You can’t make ’em talk, can you?”

I manipulated the puppets—Punch, Judy, their baby, the policeman, the devil, the crocodile—the whole cast—made them all talk.

“Hi!” Fenton shouted. “We’ll give a show! We’ll give a show the whole town of Marshall’ll come to! Three cents admission! Hi!”

“Where?” I asked. “I haven’t got any place where I can set up my Punch-and-Judy show.”

“We got the best place in the world for our show, Boothie! The Early Bird office! First show tonight! Let’s go!”

We went, and, with the help of the staff, The Early Bird office was energetically made into an auditorium. The balustrade was carried out into the warehouse yard; benches for the audience were improvised; the desks were shoved into corners, and so was the printing press after being used to produce a Punch-and-Judy handbill. Lanterns, candles, and coal-oil lamps were procured and, immediately after supper that night, the courthouse yard and the square were shrill with the voices of ex-editors and printers.

First Night

“Everybody come!” they shouted. “Right this way to The Early Bird office, to see the great Punch-and-Judy show! Step fast, laydeez and gentlemun; the great Early Bird Punch-and-Judy show’s about to begin! Three cents admission for each and every one—only three cents admission for each and all!”

Within the close walls of my theater, a tall box sided with calico, I was busy arranging the puppets in the order of their appearance when I heard a trampling of full-grown feet upon the warehouse floor and the proclamations of Fenton outside: “Kindly step right in, laydeez and gentlemun! There is room for each and all at three cents apiece. Kindly take your places inside, please, without noise and confusion, on account of the Punch-and-Judy show’s about to commence!” Then I heard his voice closer, “Kindly each and all sit down, please, without noise and confusion, laydeez and gentlemun. I will now start the show! Punch and Judy, are you ready?”

Responding, I quacked out the demoniac laughter of Punch and made the puppet appear, bowing, in the opening just over my head—to a surprising amount of applause. Punch and Judy can seldom have had a more appreciatively mirthful audience and, flattered, I made the show as long as I could. When I came forth from my enclosure, damp with exertions and the warm summer night, the last of our patrons, almost all adult, were laughing as they clumped away down the wooden sidewalk—and Fenton and his staff had yielded to money madness. We had taken in a dollar and forty-seven cents.

Tragedy in Two Acts

This sum was of course to be shared equally among us, but even so we were all prosperous, and computations already being shouted proved that the future glittered before us with gold as good as in our pockets. We couldn’t do Punch and Judy again that night because Marshall went early to bed, but we could give our show every other night from then on unendingly, with a dollar and forty-seven cents as the least possible intake for every performance—the audience had been that enthusiastic! Ten nights would mean fourteen dollars and seventy cents; a hundred nights would bring us a hundred and forty-seven dollars, a sum dumfounding—but there were the figures that proved it was coming to us, and who could deny mathematics? Slightly insane with our certain riches, we went home to bed, babbling of intended purchases.

Again on the following evening thin voices sounded through the dusk of the courthouse yard and the square, “Right this way, laydeez and gentlemun, for the great Punch-and-Judy show! Step fast, laydeez and gentlemun! Only three cents admission for each and all, so hurry; the great Punch-and-Judy show’s about to begin!” Tremulous, I stood in my calico enclosure listening for the feet of the undoubted multitude.

These feet didn’t arrive, and one by one the heralds, appealing hurtly in the darkness, returned to the small warehouse. Punch and Judy played to an audience of three dumbly gum-chewing little children—nine cents—and the next night business fell off precisely that much. We waited and waited and waited, drooping about outside our lamplighted door, hearing ironical katydids, and looking up and down the dim night of the empty village street for at least a single patron. None appeared—a mystery inexplicable until our sunken minds slowly absorbed the fact: except the three children at our second performance, everybody in Marshall with three cents to spend on a show had been there the first night. There weren’t any more.

The Early Bird had died too. In one day the theater had so wrecked the newspaper and printing establishment that even the thought of a restoration was laborious; the poor old balustrade remained among weeds in the warehouse yard, a reproachful relic.

Perhaps if I hadn’t brought the Punch-and-Judy show to Marshall, Fenton might later have worn the ink-stains of an editor instead of the frown and gown of a judge. As for me, I think the exploded dazzle of Punch and Judy in Marshall did me, too, a service. Twenty years later, when a play of mine gave me a great warm-hearted audience for my first First Night, I didn’t trust it.