America Moved. Booth Tarkington
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through the thinning crowd, scuffing the littered ground, dog-tired, yet not content to be upon my homeward way. There must be something more to see, I thought, something that Page and I had overlooked; and after a while, in a remote part of the fairgrounds, I found it.
It was a strange vehicle, four-wheeled but smallish. Upon the underpinning there was a sort of little house with glass windows, and the windows had neat little lace curtains. Between the curtains was seen a bed—a bed with a clean white coverlet, white bolster, and pillows—and the bed and the lace curtains were all that the little house contained. Moreover, the contraption was not intended to be drawn by a horse. A peculiar man, the owner of the little house, stood between the narrow shafts and, with straps over his shoulders and across his chest, was showing a small crowd of loiterers how he traveled, pulling the vehicle, his home, with him from fair to fair and town to town, he said.
He was a wild-looking man, I thought. His black clothes were tattery; the brim of his old black slouch hat blew back from his unkempt long black hair; he had a ragged black beard; and the whites of his eyes could be seen from an unusual distance. He spoke with an appealing earnestness; though I couldn’t hear what he said, because, after I’d looked into his house between the little curtains, something about the owner and his manner embarrassed me, not for myself but for him; and I withdrew to a slight knoll perhaps a hundred feet away. I stood and watched, fascinated yet unwilling to be closer.
The man stepped out of his harness, stood forth, and I comprehended that he was lecturing, so to call it, to the people about him. With great rapidity and that serious eagerness he seemed to be talking about himself, his travels, and his odd little house. I got the impression that he wasn’t quite right in his head, and I saw that his closer listeners thought this, too, and it amused them. They were increased in number until there were perhaps fifty or sixty of them, men and boys, all laughing; and the more earnest he became, the more they laughed.
He addressed them with a greater and greater vehemence; his gestures became fantastic, and the crowd about him shouted with mirth. He wasn’t angry with them; what he said, so far as I could know, was in the nature of passionate appeal, as if he begged for justice. Then he passed his hat among the crowd, while the laughter grew, and, when he examined what had been put into the hat, I saw that he was in great pain and disappointment; for he turned the hat upside down and sadly emptied it of its contents—peanut shells, tobacco quids, and apple cores. The jokers howled, and he began all over again, trying to prove that he and his house were worth his tormentors’ patronage and support.
They constantly interrupted him with cheering. The more he urged his case upon them, the louder they mocked him. Young louts among them flicked pebbles at him, tossed gobs of earth upon him, and, when he paused to wipe the dirt from his face, were in ecstasy. They knocked off his hat, and, when he patiently returned it to his head, daring ones rushed in, shoved him about, and manhandled him. He went on with his speech.
Standing on my knoll in the growing dusk, I watched and thought that my heart must break for that poor man. If I hadn’t spent all my money I would have given it to him; I would have given him everything I had. I couldn’t lift my voice against the cruel crowd that persecuted him; I didn’t know how. It seemed to me that I would give my life to aid this bullied poor creature, but I was as helpless as he. All I could do was to stand there, wrung through my vitals with an agony of pity and tenderness for anyone so oppressed. I felt that of all those who participated in the dreadful spectacle only the victim himself and I were good and would go to heaven—and with this thought, though then I knew it not, the devil tempted me and I fell.
My whole small person filled with self-esteem. I felt that the all-seeing Deity was personally looking down upon me with a sublime approval and that, although I couldn’t be of any use to the badgered creature before me, heaven would bless me for being the only person present with a noble heart. It seemed to me that God and the poor wild man and I were brought close together spiritually by my own goodness and that the three of us made a lonely light upon this earth.
Darkness was coming on deeper, and I walked away. When I left, the crowd still harried the unfortunate man; but I trudged homeward exalted. Never before—and I pray heaven never since—did I so praise myself. The supremacy of my virtue wrought a pathos about me; my holiness touched me to the quick. Lamplighters trotted whistling up the long streets, setting their slim ladders against the iron poles, then touching the glass boxes at the top into yellow illumination; and I passed beneath the lights with my hands in my pockets and my head down, my eyes wet with self-appreciation. I still felt excruciatingly sorry for the poor wild man; but the sorrier I was for him, the more credit I gave myself for it. I wept for him, and my tears were tribute to the just-discovered angelic quality of my own character. I was so good I just couldn’t bear it.
At home, when they asked me what I’d seen at the fair, I couldn’t tell them about my unhappy friend—or about me. I murmured of a Spotted Wild Boy in a side show, and went to my room to be alone with my sorrow and my perfection.
I was pretty much over it next day and just a dub again, but for grandeur of soul I’d made a great reputation with myself.
III. Snips and Snails and Puppy Dogs’ Tails
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