Chapter 28: Twelve
This busy globe which spawns us is as incapable of flattery and as intent upon its own affair, whatever that is, as a gyroscope; it keeps steadily whirling along its lawful track, and, thus far seeming to hold a right of way, spins doggedly on, with no perceptible diminution of speed to mark the most gigantic human events–it did not pause to pant and recuperate even when what seemed to Penrod its principal purpose was accomplished, and an enormous shadow, vanishing westward over its surface, marked the dawn of his twelfth birthday.
To be twelve is an attainment worth the struggle. A boy, just twelve, is like a Frenchman just elected to the Academy.
Distinction and honour wait upon him. Younger boys show deference to a person of twelve: his experience is guaranteed, his judgment, therefore, mellow; consequently, his influence is profound. Eleven is not quite satisfactory: it is only an approach. Eleven has the disadvantage of six, of nineteen, of forty-four, and of sixty-nine. But, like twelve, seven is an honourable age, and the ambition to attain it is laudable. People look forward to being seven. Similarly, twenty is worthy, and so, arbitrarily, is twenty-one; forty-five has great solidity; seventy is most commendable and each year thereafter an increasing honour. Thirteen is embarrassed by the beginnings of a new colthood; the child becomes a youth. But twelve is the very top of boyhood.
Dressing, that morning, Penrod felt that the world was changed from the world of yesterday. For one thing, he seemed to own more of it; this day was his day. And it was a day worth owning; the midsummer sunshine, pouring gold through his window, came from a cool sky, and a breeze moved pleasantly in his hair as he leaned from the sill to watch the tribe of clattering blackbirds take wing, following their leader from the trees in the yard to the day’s work in the open country. The blackbirds were his, as the sunshine and the breeze were his, for they all belonged to the day which was his birthday and therefore most surely his. Pride suffused him: he was twelve!
His father and his mother and Margaret seemed to understand the difference between to-day and yesterday. They were at the table when he descended, and they gave him a greeting which of itself marked the milestone. Habitually, his entrance into a room where his elders sat brought a cloud of apprehension: they were prone to look up in pathetic expectancy, as if their thought was, “What new awfulness is he going to start now?” But this morning they laughed; his mother rose and kissed him twelve times, so did Margaret; and his father shouted, “Well, well! How’s the man?”
Then his mother gave him a Bible and “The Vicar of Wakefield”; Margaret gave him a pair of silver-mounted hair brushes; and his father gave him a “Pocket Atlas” and a small compass.
“And now, Penrod,” said his mother, after breakfast, “I’m going to take you out in the country to pay your birthday respects to Aunt Sarah Crim.”
Aunt Sarah Crim, Penrod’s great-aunt, was his oldest living relative. She was ninety, and when Mrs. Schofield and Penrod alighted from a carriage at her gate they found her digging with a spade in the garden.
“I’m glad you brought him,” she said, desisting from labour. “Jinny’s baking a cake I’m going to send for his birthday party. Bring him in the house. I’ve got something for him.”
She led the way to her “sitting-room,” which had a pleasant smell, unlike any other smell, and, opening the drawer of a shining old what-not, took therefrom a boy’s “sling-shot,” made of a forked stick, two strips of rubber and a bit of leather.
“This isn’t for you,” she said, placing it in Penrod’s eager hand. “No. It would break all to pieces the first time you tried to shoot it, because it is thirty-five years old. I want to send it back to your father. I think it’s time. You give it to him from me, and tell him I say I believe I can trust him with it now. I took it away from him thirty-five years ago, one day after he’d killed my best hen with it, accidentally, and broken a glass pitcher on the back porch with it–accidentally. He doesn’t look like a person who’s ever done things of that sort, and I suppose he’s forgotten it so well that he believes he never did, but if you give it to him from me I think he’ll remember. You look like him, Penrod. He was anything but a handsome boy.”
After this final bit of reminiscence–probably designed to be repeated to Mr. Schofield–she disappeared in the direction of the kitchen, and returned with a pitcher of lemonade and a blue china dish sweetly freighted with flat ginger cookies of a composition that was her own secret. Then, having set this collation before her guests, she presented Penrod with a superb, intricate, and very modern machine of destructive capacities almost limitless. She called it a pocket-knife.
“I suppose you’ll do something horrible with it,” she said, composedly. “I hear you do that with everything, anyhow, so you might as well do it with this, and have more fun out of it. They tell me you’re the Worst Boy in Town.”
“Oh, Aunt Sarah!” Mrs. Schofield lifted a protesting hand.
“Nonsense!” said Mrs. Crim.
“But on his birthday!”
“That’s the time to say it. Penrod, aren’t you the Worst Boy in Town?”
Penrod, gazing fondly upon his knife and eating cookies rapidly, answered as a matter of course, and absently, “Yes’m.”
“Certainly!” said Mrs. Crim. “Once you accept a thing about yourself as established and settled, it’s all right. Nobody minds. Boys are just people, really.”
“No, no!” Mrs. Schofield cried, involuntarily.
“Yes, they are,” returned Aunt Sarah. “Only they’re not quite so awful, because they haven’t learned to cover themselves all over with little pretences. When Penrod grows up he’ll be just the same as he is now, except that whenever he does what he wants to do he’ll tell himself and other people a little story about it to make his reason for doing it seem nice and pretty and noble.”
“No, I won’t!” said Penrod suddenly.
“There’s one cookie left,” observed Aunt Sarah. “Are you going to eat it?”
“Well,” said her great-nephew, thoughtfully, “I guess I better.”
“Why?” asked the old lady. “Why do you guess you’d ‘better’?”
“Well,” said Penrod, with a full mouth, “it might get all dried up if nobody took it, and get thrown out and wasted.”
“You’re beginning finely,” Mrs. Crim remarked. “A year ago you’d have taken the cookie without the same sense of thrift.”
“Ma’am?”
“Nothing. I see that you’re twelve years old, that’s all. There are more cookies, Penrod.” She went away, returning with a fresh supply and the observation, “Of course, you’ll be sick before the day’s over; you might as well get a good start.”
Mrs. Schofield looked thoughtful. “Aunt Sarah,” she ventured, “don’t you really think we improve as we get older?”
“Meaning,” said the old lady, “that Penrod hasn’t much chance to escape the penitentiary if he doesn’t? Well, we do learn to restrain ourselves in some things; and there are people who really want someone else to take the last cookie, though they aren’t very common. But it’s all right, the world seems to be getting on.” She gazed whimsically upon her great-nephew and added, “Of course, when you watch a boy and think about him, it doesn’t seem to be getting on very fast.”
Penrod moved uneasily in his chair; he was conscious that he was her topic but unable to make out whether or not her observations were complimentary; he inclined to think they were not. Mrs. Crim settled the question for him.
“I suppose Penrod is regarded as the neighbourhood curse?”
“Oh, no,” cried Mrs. Schofield. “He—-”
“I dare say the neighbours are right,” continued the old lady placidly. “He’s had to repeat the history of the race and go through all the stages from the primordial to barbarism. You don’t expect boys to be civilized, do you?”
“Well, I—-”
“You might as well expect eggs to crow. No; you’ve got to take boys as they are, and learn to know them as they are.”
“Naturally, Aunt Sarah,” said Mrs. Schofield, “I know Penrod.”
Aunt Sarah laughed heartily. “Do you think his father knows him, too?”
“Of course, men are different,” Mrs. Schofield returned, apologetically. “But a mother knows—-”
“Penrod,” said Aunt Sarah, solemnly, “does your father understand you?”
“Ma’am?”
“About as much as he’d understand Sitting Bull!” she laughed.
“And I’ll tell you what your mother thinks you are, Penrod. Her real belief is that you’re a novice in a convent.”
“Ma’am?”
“Aunt Sarah!”
“I know she thinks that, because whenever you don’t behave like a novice she’s disappointed in you. And your father really believes that you’re a decorous, well-trained young business man, and whenever you don’t live up to that standard you get on his nerves and he thinks you need a walloping. I’m sure a day very seldom passes without their both saying they don’t know what on earth to do with you. Does whipping do you any good, Penrod?”
“Ma’am?”
“Go on and finish the lemonade; there’s about glassful left. Oh, take it, take it; and don’t say why! Of course you’re a little pig.”
Penrod laughed gratefully, his eyes fixed upon her over the rim of his uptilted glass.
“Fill yourself up uncomfortably,” said the old lady. “You’re twelve years old, and you ought to be happy–if you aren’t anything else. It’s taken over nineteen hundred years of Christianity and some hundreds of thousands of years of other things to produce you, and there you sit!”
“Ma’am?”
“It’ll be your turn to struggle and muss things up, for the betterment of posterity, soon enough,” said Aunt Sarah Crim. “Drink your lemonade!”
Chapter 29: Fanchon
“Aunt Sarah’s a funny old lady,” Penrod observed, on the way back to the town. “What’s she want me to give papa this old sling for? Last thing she said was to be sure not to forget to give it to him. He don’t want it; and she said, herself, it ain’t any good. She’s older than you or papa, isn’t she?”
“About fifty years older,” answered Mrs. Schofield, turning upon him a stare of perplexity. “Don’t cut into the leather with your new knife, dear; the livery man might ask us to pay if—- No. I wouldn’t scrape the paint off, either–nor whittle your shoe with it. Couldn’t you put it up until we get home?”
“We goin’ straight home?”
“No. We’re going to stop at Mrs. Gelbraith’s and ask a strange little girl to come to your party, this afternoon.”
“Who?”
“Her name is Fanchon. She’s Mrs. Gelbraith’s little niece.”
“What makes her so queer?”
“I didn’t say she’s queer.”
“You said—-”
“No; I mean that she is a stranger. She lives in New York and has come to visit here.”
“What’s she live in New York for?”
“Because her parents live there. You must be very nice to her, Penrod; she has been very carefully brought up. Besides, she doesn’t know the children here, and you must help to keep her from feeling lonely at your party.”
“Yes’m.”
When they reached Mrs. Gelbraith’s, Penrod sat patiently humped upon a gilt chair during the lengthy exchange of greetings between his mother. and Mrs. Gelbraith. That is one of the things a boy must learn to bear: when his mother meets a compeer there is always a long and dreary wait for him, while the two appear to be using strange symbols of speech, talking for the greater part, it seems to him, simultaneously, and employing a wholly incomprehensible system of emphasis at other times not in vogue. Penrod twisted his legs, his cap and his nose.
“Here she is!” Mrs. Gelbraith cried, unexpectedly, and a dark-haired, demure person entered the room wearing a look of gracious social expectancy. In years she was eleven, in manner about sixty-five, and evidently had lived much at court. She performed a curtsey in acknowledgment of Mrs. Schofield’s greeting, and bestowed her hand upon Penrod, who had entertained no hope of such an honour, showed his surprise that it should come to him, and was plainly unable to decide what to do about it.
“Fanchon, dear,” said Mrs. Gelbraith, “take Penrod out in the yard for a while, and play.”
“Let go the little girl’s hand, Penrod,” Mrs. Schofield laughed, as the children turned toward the door.
Penrod hastily dropped the small hand, and exclaiming, with simple honesty, “Why, I don’t want it!” followed Fanchon out into the sunshiny yard, where they came to a halt and surveyed each other.
Penrod stared awkwardly at Fanchon, no other occupation suggesting itself to him, while Fanchon, with the utmost coolness, made a very thorough visual examination of Penrod, favouring him with an estimating scrutiny which lasted until he literally wiggled. Finally, she spoke.
“Where do you buy your ties?” she asked.
“What?”
“Where do you buy your neckties? Papa gets his at Skoone’s. You ought to get yours there. I’m sure the one you’re wearing isn’t from Skoone’s.”
“Skoone’s?” Penrod repeated. “Skoone’s?”
“On Fifth Avenue,” said Fanchon. “It’s a very smart shop, the men say.”
“Men?” echoed Penrod, in a hazy whisper. “Men?”
“Where do your people go in summer?” inquired the lady. “We go to Long Shore, but so many middle-class people have begun coming there, mamma thinks of leaving. The middle classes are simply awful, don’t you think?”
“What?”
“They’re so boorjaw. You speak French, of course?”
“Me?”
“We ran over to Paris last year. It’s lovely, don’t you think? Don’t you love the Rue de la Paix?”
Penrod wandered in a labyrinth. This girl seemed to be talking, but her words were dumfounding, and of course there was no way for him to know that he was really listening to her mother. It was his first meeting with one of those grown-up little girls, wonderful product of the winter apartment and summer hotel; and Fanchon, an only child, was a star of the brand. He began to feel resentful.
“I suppose,” she went on, “I’ll find everything here fearfully Western. Some nice people called yesterday, though. Do you know the Magsworth Bittses? Auntie says they’re charming. Will Roddy be at your party?”
“I guess he will,” returned Penrod, finding this intelligible. “The mutt!”
“Really!” Fanchon exclaimed airily. “Aren’t you great pals with him?”
“What’s ‘pals’?”
“Good heavens! Don’t you know what it means to say you’re ‘great pals’ with any one? You are an odd child!”
It was too much.
“Oh, Bugs!” said Penrod.
This bit of ruffianism had a curious effect. Fanchon looked upon him with sudden favour.
“I like you, Penrod!” she said, in an odd way, and, whatever else there may have been in her manner, there certainly was no shyness.
“Oh, Bugs!” This repetition may have lacked gallantry, but it was uttered in no very decided tone. Penrod was shaken.
“Yes, I do!” She stepped closer to him, smiling. “Your hair is ever so pretty.”
Sailors’ parrots swear like mariners, they say; and gay mothers ought to realize that all children are imitative, for, as the precocious Fanchon leaned toward Penrod, the manner in which she looked into his eyes might have made a thoughtful observer wonder where she had learned her pretty ways.
Penrod was even more confused than he had been by her previous mysteries: but his confusion was of a distinctly pleasant and alluring nature: he wanted more of it. Looking intentionally into another person’s eyes is an act unknown to childhood; and Penrod’s discovery that it could be done was sensational. He had never thought of looking into the eyes of Marjorie Jones.
Despite all anguish, contumely, tar, and Maurice Levy, he still secretly thought of Marjorie, with pathetic constancy, as his “beau”–though that is not how he would have spelled it. Marjorie was beautiful; her curls were long and the colour of amber; her nose was straight and her freckles were honest; she was much prettier than this accomplished visitor. But beauty is not all.
“I do!” breathed Fanchon, softly.
She seemed to him a fairy creature from some rosier world than this. So humble is the human heart, it glorifies and makes glamorous almost any poor thing that says to it: “I like you!”
Penrod was enslaved. He swallowed, coughed, scratched the back of his neck, and said, disjointedly:
“Well–I don’t care if you want to. I just as soon.”
“We’ll dance together,” said Fanchon, “at your party.”
“I guess so. I just as soon.”
“Don’t you want to, Penrod?”
“Well, I’m willing to.”
“No. Say you want to!”
“Well—-”
He used his toe as a gimlet, boring into the ground, his wide open eyes staring with intense vacancy at a button on his sleeve.
His mother appeared upon the porch in departure, calling farewells over her shoulder to Mrs. Gelbraith, who stood in the doorway.
“Say it!” whispered Fanchon.
“Well, I just as soon.”
She seemed satisfied.