America Moved. Booth Tarkington
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mine now of the days of the Great Panic.
Possibly I shouldn’t remember that disaster at all if we hadn’t lost our house and the sunny green yard where I’d played. No recollections of protests or wailings from my father, my plucky mother, and my sparklingly pretty fifteen-year-old sister recall it to me; their endurance of the change hadn’t a flinch, though the blows must have been heavy and many for all three of them. About me there seemed always the sound of laughter, and my father’s indomitable gaiety kept my world in place, made living in it an experience safely all of gusto and merriment.
An addition to my evening prayers, however, indicates that my mother had special hopes. After the customary conclusion, “I pray the Lord my soul to take,” I was instructed to append, and did: “Please bless papa and mamma and Hautie and Boothie, and make Uncle Newton senator and papa county clerk.” The governor’s term of office in California drew near its close, and the county clerkship, at home, was rewarded by fees that sometimes, I believe, approached thirty thousand dollars a year—probably about thirty times the income my father was then somehow wringing out of his legal practice.
It was at this period, when I was four and five and six, that my complacent view of myself began to be damaged. Explanation mayn’t be needed that the shocking vanity of children shocks nobody; mine was inside me and I have been told that I was regarded as a rather solemn little boy, quiet and given to ruminations. Nevertheless, my life, so far, had brought me no cause to look upon myself as imperfect in any detail. My conduct was sometimes directed, but never criticized, and I hadn’t yet begun to wonder what sort of person I was—or what sort of looking person I was. A complete content with myself and a subservient world prevailed—until I encountered the boy called Brick-top.
There was no lawn about the frame house where we lived in dusty New York Street—in summer all the streets not cobbled were mostly dust—but the sidewalk, close to the front door, was shady and became my playground. Children of the neighborhood joined me there, played with my toys, held converse with me, and thus I became acquainted with Brick-top, who was a head taller than I was and the son, as he often mentioned, of a professional fireman.
Whenever I had to wear my little light blue velvet breeches and Brick-top saw me in them, he would tell me again that his father was a fireman.
On a promising afternoon I had a dime and was on my way to the corner drugstore to buy candy. Aged five, I had no conception of any other sensible use of money; this infrequent dime brought heaven close, for my palate was what I most dearly cared about. I held it to be the high seat of pleasure, and was indifferent to objects with which it had already dealt and passed on to the alimentary canal. When such objects roused an enemy within me, so long as the urge of taste lasted I would go on eating—sometimes even moaning a little—what my stomach fought to tell me it could not include. Real money was high in 1874, commodities were low, and my shining dime foretold a longish debauch.
Low Finance
Outside the drugstore Brick-top stopped me and made inquiries. I opened my hand, showed the dime, and announced my purpose, naturally not adding any hospitable offer.
“I got a good deal more money than that,” Brick-top said; and took from his pocket a large copper two-cent piece and an even larger one-cent piece, coinage of that epoch. Beside them the small dime looked inconsequent. “This money o’ mine’s lots more money than that dime o’ yours,” said Brick-top.
“Is it?” I asked. “Would it buy more candy than my dime would, Brick-top?”
‘Lots more,” he told me, and frowned, seeming to ponder. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do, though,” he said. “I’ll trade you all this money for your dime. Mine’s more; but I like you and I’ll trade. All this money I got is too heavy to carry around. It kind of weighs me down.”
“It kind of weighs me down” were his long-remembered words precisely. I was not wholly senseless; I needed a real argument to persuade me to the exchange, and there it was. “It kind of weighs me down.” Brick-top didn’t want to get tired. I traded my dime for three cents, not without a troubled kind of gratitude.
Brick-top was not to be seen when I came out of the drugstore after a startling talk with a derisive clerk. I walked home laggingly, pausing often, and becoming on the way a slightly different sort of person.
An Enemy Raid
The psychologists tell us that these childish jolts affect our whole lives. Deeply puzzled as I returned from the enlightening drugstore, I had a vague realization, for the first time in my life, that a fellow being had made a fool of me. Dazingly it began to appear to me that some people did such things and that I wasn’t all-wise. This seems to have been my first self-doubt.
Brick-top, ere long, gave me another. I had the most magnificent hobby-horse in the world, a maned and tailed and caparisoned bright creature, the gift of Uncle Newton, and brought to me all the way from California. One day I left it on the sidewalk during the noon meal; and when I came back to it, to ride again, I was sickened. A horrible decapitation had taken place. My horse stood headless, with raw wood showing plaintively where the neck had joined the sculptured and painted shoulders.
“Brick-top did it!” said the little girl who had remained near by to inform me. “Brick-top threw a brickbat at it and knocked its head off and grabbed it and ran away with it!”
I stood and stood. I began to suspect that I was not universally loved—even that I could be disliked. My impression now is that although Brick-top’s father’s pay as a fireman probably exceeded what my father was making in his law office, Brick-top felt that he was right to despoil me and be my enemy, because I was a Little Rich Boy who sometimes wore blue velvet breeches.
Subsequently, Brick-top did other things to me. I don’t recall what they were, but one of them brought me another mystification about myself. All alone, I was whispering, and at intervals speaking aloud, my topic being the most recent of Brick-top’s inflictions upon me.
“What do you stand it for?” I asked. “What makes you let him treat you like that?”
“Well, I’m not going to much longer,” I responded. “Brick-top better look out! If you were me you wouldn’t let him act like that, would you?”
“No, I wouldn’t,” I said. “But all you do’s talk. Why don’t you show him?”
“You make me sick!” I said truculently. “Didn’t you just hear me say I’m going to——”
I stopped muttering, having realized that I was almost quarreling with somebody. With whom?
I stood in wonder, becoming aware that it was a habit of mine to hold debate with this unknown; and there seemed to be, also, a third person present—somebody who listened coldly to both of us—but of him I could make nothing at all except that it was uncomfortable to think about him. The second person, my talkative opponent, tried to goad me into actions that I couldn’t take; yet at heart seemed really sympathetic. What puzzled me most was the way we said “You” to each other, since both of us must, after all, be me. I hadn’t solved the puzzle when, at about this time, I became—almost officially with some people—the Worst Boy in Town.
My mother’s piano had been salvaged from the financial wreck; evenings on New York Street were gay with the singing of the three older members of my family—ballads, songs old and new, melodies from The Bohemian Girl and the Verdi operas—and once a week a shattered friend of my mother’s taught a small dancing class of children in our parlor, with an assistant at the piano. The children were accompanied by their mothers, and one of these ladies had an emotional aversion to cats. Therefore, our cat, though lovable, was kept in a back room during the dancing hour, but one day an older boy secretly talked me into becoming a comedian. He convinced me that if I’d fetch the cat privately, approach little Eva Townley’s mother from behind as she sat watching the lesson, and drop pussy over her shoulder to alight upon her lap, Mrs. Townley’d be surprised and all would be joy and nice harmless merriment. I needn’t tell anybody that the idea was his; I could take all credit for it.
Expecting to delight the