America Moved. Booth Tarkington
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betrousered to the instep, but for a long period in American history boys were universally convinced that the first splendid step forward toward manhood was getting into long trousers. Immediately upon that uplifting enclosure we believed ourselves freed of the most poignantly offensive of all adjectives—“little.” A boy in long trousers wasn’t, ruinously, a little boy any more; he was a boy—in fact, almost a youth. Some of us, pets of destiny in being granted careless parents, accomplished the great change at ten; more were emancipated at eleven; and at twelve only a few were fondly and fashionably still pinioned down in knee-breeched little-boyness. Purgatorially, I was one of these.
Clothes Unmake the Man
With the peculiar aid of a grandfather, I had attempted a great stroke to improve my condition. Grandfather and Grandmother Booth spent the winters with us now; and he, almost ninety, retaining the fashion of the considerable men of his day, never wore outer garments except of dark broadcloth. Without difficulty I talked him into giving me two elderly pairs of his trousers and a dollar, and these I bore to a wearied foreign tailor with whom I’d been privately conducting urgent negotiations. I was small for my age, and my grandfather was of normal size for his; but the tailor was sure that even for a dollar he couldn’t get enough good cloth out of one pair of trousers somewhat worn; so there had to be two. The garment he made for me I brought home through the dusk of an eager day, and, examining the work by gaslight in my own room, I believed that I had a pair of trousers equal to any youth’s in the world.
After breakfast the next morning I put them on, got out of the house unobserved, and, on my way to school, walked down the street in a man’s sunlight. I went most of the way without passing anybody, then at a corner encountered a long shabby male person with auburn thin whiskers—I remember them. He observed me with some attention and burst into a loud, discordant laugh.
He upset me, rather, though I hadn’t the faintest idea what was the matter with him. At long last here I was, properly clad for the first time in years! He must be a doggone fool, I thought; something must be wrong with him to just look at a person and laugh like that. It appeared that even in long trousers you could never tell what whisker-growing adults were likely to do.
Making myself right for this life had brought me late to school, and when I reached my seat in the back row the teacher called upon me to come forward to her desk and try to explain my tardiness. I was so used to doing this, and my classmates were so accustomed to seeing me do it, that it was virtually routine; but as I passed down the aisle a titter followed me. It increased, grew louder irrepressibly, and, as I stood enduring it in the open space before the teacher, it attained the full volume of unanimous schoolroom laughter. I turned in plaintive inquiry; the teacher tapped her pencil sharply upon the desk, and then, as I turned back to her, I found that she’d grown red and seemed unable to express herself.
Feeling naked, I looked down at me, and saw only perfection. My mind was lost in mystification as she indistinctly dismissed me to my seat and I returned to it through a spluttering aisle.
At recess, immediately surrounded, I moved helplessly as the center of a ring of mirth lovers who made but one response to all my inquiries: “Look at your britches!”
I did, again and again, but without enlightenment. Not until I was on my homeward way for lunch did a true friend help me to discover what my dreamy grandfather hadn’t considered, what I in my happy haste hadn’t observed, and what the tailor hadn’t worried himself about.
“It’s your britches,” Henry told me. “They’re different colors.”
“But they aren’t!” I cried. “They’re just black! Haven’t I looked a thousand times?”
“Yea, but you keep looking down at you in front,” he said. “Maybe the nap in back’s turned a different way from the nap in front, or maybe they’re made out of somebody else’s different britches; but you may be black in front, but you’re gray behind. Anyhow you’re different colors.”
I was; and a few seconds after I reached home my agony in Grandfather Booth’s mixed trousers was over. The kind old man, lost in reverie, didn’t even notice that he never saw me in them. I gave him up as an ally.
Back into knee breeches and little-boyness again, I brooded longingly upon the far future when I’d be twenty-one and legally independent of a mother’s care. Especially on Saturdays, on my way to dancing school, I made plans for my twenty-first birthday, when I’d begin never wearing overshoes any more and would decline ever again to have anything whatever fastened on me with pins. I wouldn’t wear a white collar outside my jacket collar; I’d have a collar from a men’s store and it would be made secure with collar buttons. I wouldn’t have a wide silk ribbon under the collar and I wouldn’t permit any woman to tie such a ribbon into a bow under my chin; I’d have a ready-made necktie fastened with a buckle. And most of all I wouldn’t let any woman brush my hair; I’d have a barber come to the house every morning before breakfast and brush my hair for the day, no matter what he charged.
Dancing school was in the ballroom of the finest and largest house in Indianapolis, a neighbor’s; but that didn’t brighten my performances and undergoings there. I was no better at dancing than I was at anything else I tried to do with my feet, or hands, or both. Round and round the great room the small couples went, while the piano tinkled and the professor called: “One, two, three! One, two, three! One, two, three!”—and almost every single time any little girl shouted “Ouch!” it was because I’d stepped on her. Whenever I took my place in one of the formations for the quadrille or lancers, all the other participants looked about to see if they couldn’t get into another; and in the whole of my dancing-school experience, just one encouraging thing happened. It didn’t encourage me long.
At the center of the polished floor the most beautiful of the little girls—the star in all the dancing—stood holding a small round cap in her hand; and all the boys, under instructions from the professor, circled about her, learning a special figure of the dance then called the “german.” She was to place the cap upon the head of the boy with whom she wished to dance—and, startlingly, she stepped toward him who least expected to be chosen. Dazed, I felt the cap upon my transfigured head. Intoxicated, blue lights swimming about me, I danced with her, walked upon her little slippers, slid, skidded, staggered, bumped into everybody and floundered in Elysium. When it was over, another true friend of mine whispered to me congratulatingly:
“I’m glad Nellie picked you. It’s nice because some of the class think she’s stuck-up, but this proves to everybody how kindhearted she is.”
So it did—even to me.
Another maiden of the class showed kindness to me, or at least was philosophic and bore pain stoically; for, though her sensitive small face quivered, she never outright screeched when I stepped on her. I ill-requited her goodness. She was the littlest girl, exquisite, but only five years old, and, when her evil star doomed her to be my partner and I went clumping round the ballroom, towing her fairylike lightness and usually damaging it, I had no thought for her, but only pitied myself for looking too much the bigger half of an ill-assorted couple.
Jesse James, a Tragedy in Fourteen Acts
This self-pity was what caused me finally to write a note to her, palliating my absence from the last meeting of the dancing class that year, an occasion upon which the poor child was to have been my partner for the whole session. Fifteen years later, when in full-grown loveliness she burst upon me, so to speak, at another kind of dance and I entreated to be her partner, however briefly, she said yes, if I’d behave better than last time. Then she repeated verbatim the note I’d sent her “last time,” for her mother still kept it in a scrapbook. Long after that, when I was writing a story about a boy who was not at all myself, though of course here and there, in scattered spots, a slight reflection of bits of me, I printed the note as his; and this was it:
Dear Madam: Please excuse me from dancing the cotillion with you this afternoon as I have fell off the barn
Sincerely yours,
Newton Booth Tarkington.6
When summer again approached and I was near upon thirteen, still in knee breeches,