America Moved. Booth Tarkington
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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