America Moved. Booth Tarkington
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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,