Soaring

Guest Blogger Dept.: Once again, Booth Tarkington takes the blogger seat, with an excerpt from one of his most famous novels, Penrod. Young Penrod is in a classroom, suffering the droning of the imperious Miss Spence. He has amused himself by dipping the pigtails of Victorine, the girl who sits in front of him, in the inkwell of his desk; he has recollected the inspiringly melodramatic adventures he enjoyed during a recent, illicit trip to a picture-show. But it’s more challenging still to escape the tortures of mathematics. Enjoy this journey back to the first decade of the last century.

                                                                                           

Drawing by Gordon Grant

HALF THE MEMBERS OF THE CLASS passed out to a recitation-room, the empurpled Victorine among them, and Miss Spence started the remaining half through the ordeal of trial by mathematics. Several boys and girls were sent to the blackboard, and Penrod, spared for the moment, followed their operations a little while with his eyes, but not with his mind; then, sinking deeper in his seat, limply abandoned the effort. His eyes remained open, but saw nothing; the routine of the arithmetic lesson reached his ears in familiar, meaningless sounds, but he heard nothing; and yet, this time, he was profoundly occupied. He had drifted away from the painful land of facts, and floated now in a new sea of fancy

Maturity forgets the marvellous realness of a boy’s day-dreams, how colourful they glow, rosy and living, and how opaque the curtain closing down between the dreamer and the actual world. That curtain is almost sound-proof, too, and causes more throat-trouble among parents than is suspected.

The nervous monotony of the schoolroom inspires a sometimes unbearable longing for something astonishing to happen, and as every boy’s fundamental desire is to do something astonishing himself, so as to be the centre of all human interest and awe, it was natural that Penrod should discover in fancy the delightful secret of self-levitation. He found, in this curious series of imaginings, during the lesson in arithmetic, that the atmosphere may be navigated as by a swimmer under water, but with infinitely greater ease and with perfect comfort in breathing. In his mind he extended his arms gracefully, at a level with his shoulders, and delicately paddled the air with his hands, which at once caused him to be drawn up out of his seat and elevated gently to a position about midway between the floor and the ceiling, where he came to an equilibrium and floated; a sensation not the less exquisite because of the screams of his fellow pupils, appalled by the miracle. Miss Spence herself was amazed and frightened, but he only smiled down carelessly upon her when she commanded him to return to earth; and then, when she climbed upon a desk to pull him down, he quietly paddled himself a little higher, leaving his toes just out of her reach. Next, he swam through a few slow somersaults to show his mastery of the new art, and, with the shouting of the dumfounded scholars ringing in his ears, turned on his side and floated swiftly out of the window, immediately rising above the housetops, while people in the street below him shrieked, and a trolley car stopped dead in wonder.

With almost no exertion he paddled himself, many yards at a stroke, to the girls’ private school where Marjorie Jones was a pupil—Marjorie Jones of the amber curls and the golden voice! Long before the “Pageant of the Table Round,” she had offered Penrod a hundred proofs that she considered him wholly undesirable and ineligible. At the Friday Afternoon Dancing Class she consistently incited and led the laughter at him whenever Professor Bartet singled him out for admonition in matters of feet and decorum. And but yesterday she had chid him for his slavish lack of memory in daring to offer her a greeting on the way to Sunday-school. “Well! I expect you must forgot I told you never to speak to me again! If I was a boy, I’d be too proud to come hanging around people that don’t speak to me, even if I WAS the Worst Boy in Town!” So she flouted him. But now, as he floated in through the window of her classroom and swam gently along the ceiling like an escaped toy balloon, she fell upon her knees beside her little desk, and, lifting up her arms toward him, cried with love and admiration:

“Oh, PENrod!”

He negligently kicked a globe from the high chandelier, and, smiling coldly, floated out through the hall to the front steps of the school, while Marjorie followed, imploring him to grant her one kind look.

In the street an enormous crowd had gathered, headed by Miss Spence and a brass band; and a cheer from a hundred thousand throats shook the very ground as Penrod swam overhead. Marjorie knelt upon the steps and watched adoringly while Penrod took the drum-major’s baton and, performing sinuous evolutions above the crowd, led the band. Then he threw the baton so high that it disappeared from sight; but he went swiftly after it, a double delight, for he had not only the delicious sensation of rocketing safely up and up into the blue sky, but also that of standing in the crowd below, watching and admiring himself as he dwindled to a speck, disappeared and then, emerging from a cloud, came speeding down, with the baton in his hand, to the level of the treetops, where he beat time for the band and the vast throng and Marjorie Jones, who all united in the “Star-spangled Banner” in honour of his aerial achievements. It was a great moment.

It was a great moment, but something seemed to threaten it. The face of Miss Spence looking up from the crowd grew too vivid—unpleasantly vivid. She was beckoning him and shouting, “Come down, Penrod Schofield! Penrod Schofield, come down here!”

He could hear her above the band and the singing of the multitude; she seemed intent on spoiling everything. Marjorie Jones was weeping to show how sorry she was that she had formerly slighted him, and throwing kisses to prove that she loved him; but Miss Spence kept jumping between him and Marjorie, incessantly calling his name.

He grew more and more irritated with her; he was the most important person in the world and was engaged in proving it to Marjorie Jones and the whole city, and yet Miss Spence seemed to feel she still had the right to order him about as she did in the old days when he was an ordinary schoolboy. He was furious; he was sure she wanted him to do something disagreeable. It seemed to him that she had screamed “Penrod Schofield!” thousands of times.

From the beginning of his aerial experiments in his own schoolroom, he had not opened his lips, knowing somehow that one of the requirements for air floating is perfect silence on the part of the floater; but, finally, irritated beyond measure by Miss Spence’s clamorous insistence, he was unable to restrain an indignant rebuke and immediately came to earth with a frightful bump.

Miss Spence—in the flesh—had directed toward the physical body of the absent Penrod an inquiry as to the fractional consequences of dividing seventeen apples, fairly, among three boys, and she was surprised and displeased to receive no answer although to the best of her knowledge and belief, he was looking fixedly at her. She repeated her question crisply, without visible effect; then summoned him by name with increasing asperity. Twice she called him, while all his fellow pupils turned to stare at the gazing boy. She advanced a step from the platform.

“Penrod Schofield!”

“Oh, my goodness!” he shouted suddenly. “Can’t you keep still a MINUTE?”

Miss Spence gasped. So did the pupils.

The whole room filled with a swelling conglomerate “O-O-O-O-H!”

As for Penrod himself, the walls reeled with the shock. He sat with his mouth open, a mere lump of stupefaction. For the appalling words that he had hurled at the teacher were as inexplicable to him as to any other who heard them.

Nothing is more treacherous than the human mind; nothing else so loves to play the Iscariot. Even when patiently bullied into a semblance of order and training, it may prove but a base and shifty servant. And Penrod’s mind was not his servant; it was a master, with the April wind’s whims; and it had just played him a diabolical trick. The very jolt with which he came back to the schoolroom in the midst of his fancied flight jarred his day-dream utterly out of him; and he sat, open-mouthed in horror at what he had said.

The unanimous gasp of awe was protracted. Miss Spence, however, finally recovered her breath, and, returning deliberately to the platform, faced the school. “And then for a little while,” as pathetic stories sometimes recount, “everything was very still.” It was so still, in fact, that Penrod’s newborn notoriety could almost be heard growing. This grisly silence was at last broken by the teacher.

“Penrod Schofield, stand up!”

The miserable child obeyed.

“What did you mean by speaking to me in that way?”

He hung his head, raked the floor with the side of his shoe, swayed, swallowed, looked suddenly at his hands with the air of never having seen them before, then clasped them behind him. The school shivered in ecstatic horror, every fascinated eye upon him; yet there was not a soul in the room but was profoundly grateful to him for the sensation—including the offended teacher herself. Unhappily, all this gratitude was unconscious and altogether different from the kind which, results in testimonials and loving-cups. On the contrary!

“Penrod Schofield!”

He gulped.

“Answer me at once! Why did you speak to me like that?”

“I was——” He choked, unable to continue.

“Speak out!”

“I was just—thinking,” he managed to stammer.

“That will not do,” she returned sharply. “I wish to know immediately why you spoke as you did.”

The stricken Penrod answered helplessly: “Because I was just thinking.”

Upon the very rack he could have offered no ampler truthful explanation. It was all he knew about it.

“Thinking what?”

“Just thinking.”

Miss Spence’s expression gave evidence that her power of self-restraint was undergoing a remarkable test. However, after taking counsel with herself, she commanded:

“Come here!”

He shuffled forward, and she placed a chair upon the platform near her own.

“Sit there!”

Then (but not at all as if nothing had happened), she continued the lesson in arithmetic. Spiritually the children may have learned a lesson in very small fractions indeed as they gazed at the fragment of sin before them on the stool of penitence. They all stared at him attentively with hard and passionately interested eyes, in which there was never one trace of pity. It cannot be said with precision that he writhed; his movement was more a slow, continuous squirm, effected with a ghastly assumption of languid indifference; while his gaze, in the effort to escape the marble-hearted glare of his schoolmates, affixed itself with apparent permanence to the waistcoat button of James Russell Lowell just above the “U” in “Russell.”

Classes came and classes went, grilling him with eyes. Newcomers received the story of the crime in darkling whispers; and the outcast sat and sat and sat, and squirmed and squirmed and squirmed. (He did one or two things with his spine which a professional contortionist would have observed with real interest.) And all this while of freezing suspense was but the criminal’s detention awaiting trial. A known punishment may be anticipated with some measure of equanimity; at least, the prisoner may prepare himself to undergo it; but the unknown looms more monstrous for every attempt to guess it. Penrod’s crime was unique; there were no rules to aid him in estimating the vengeance to fall upon him for it. What seemed most probable was that he would be expelled from the schools in the presence of his family, the mayor, and council, and afterward whipped by his father upon the State House steps, with the entire city as audience by invitation of the authorities.

Noon came. The rows of children filed out, every head turning for a last unpleasingly speculative look at the outlaw. Then Miss Spence closed the door into the cloakroom and that into the big hall, and came and sat at her desk, near Penrod. The tramping of feet outside, the shrill calls and shouting and the changing voices of the older boys ceased to be heard—and there was silence. Penrod, still affecting to be occupied with Lowell, was conscious that Miss Spence looked at him intently.

“Penrod,” she said gravely, “what excuse have you to offer before I report your case to the principal?”

The word “principal” struck him to the vitals. Grand Inquisitor, Grand Khan, Sultan, Emperor, Tsar, Caesar Augustus—these are comparable. He stopped squirming instantly, and sat rigid.

“I want an answer. Why did you shout those words at me?”

“Well,” he murmured, “I was just—thinking.”

“Thinking what?” she asked sharply.

“I don’t know.”

“That won’t do!”

He took his left ankle in his right hand and regarded it helplessly.

“That won’t do, Penrod Schofield,” she repeated severely. “If that is all the excuse you have to offer I shall report your case this instant!”

And she rose with fatal intent.

But Penrod was one of those whom the precipice inspires. “Well, I HAVE got an excuse.”

“Well”—she paused impatiently—“what is it?”

He had not an idea, but he felt one coming, and replied automatically, in a plaintive tone:

“I guess anybody that had been through what I had to go through, last night, would think they had an excuse.”

Miss Spence resumed her seat, though with the air of being ready to leap from it instantly.

“What has last night to do with your insolence to me this morning?”

“Well, I guess you’d see,” he returned, emphasizing the plaintive note, “if you knew what I know.”

“Now, Penrod,” she said, in a kinder voice, “I have a high regard for your mother and father, and it would hurt me to distress them, but you must either tell me what was the matter with you or I’ll have to take you to Mrs. Houston.”

“Well, ain’t I going to?” he cried, spurred by the dread name. “It’s because I didn’t sleep last night.”

“Were you ill?” The question was put with some dryness.

He felt the dryness. “No’m; I wasn’t.”

“Then if someone in your family was so ill that even you were kept up all night, how does it happen they let you come to school this morning?”

“It wasn’t illness,” he returned, shaking his head mournfully. “It was lots worse’n anybody’s being sick. It was—it was—well, it was jest awful.”

“WHAT was?” He remarked with anxiety the incredulity in her tone.

“It was about Aunt Clara,” he said.

“Your Aunt Clara!” she repeated. “Do you mean your mother’s sister who married Mr. Farry of Dayton, Illinois?”

“Yes—Uncle John,” returned Penrod sorrowfully. “The trouble was about him.”

Miss Spence frowned a frown which he rightly interpreted as one of continued suspicion. “She and I were in school together,” she said. “I used to know her very well, and I’ve always heard her married life was entirely happy. I don’t——”

“Yes, it was,” he interrupted, “until last year when Uncle John took to running with travelling men——”

“What?”

“Yes’m.” He nodded solemnly. “That was what started it. At first he was a good, kind husband, but these travelling men would coax him into a saloon on his way home from work, and they got him to drinking beer and then ales, wines, liquors, and cigars——“

“Penrod!”

“Ma’am?”

“I’m not inquiring into your Aunt Clara’s private affairs; I’m asking you if you have anything to say which would palliate——”

“That’s what I’m tryin’ to TELL you about, Miss Spence,” he pleaded,—“if you’d jest only let me. When Aunt Clara and her little baby daughter got to our house last night——”

“You say Mrs. Farry is visiting your mother?”

“Yes’m—not just visiting—you see, she HAD to come. Well of course, little baby Clara, she was so bruised up and mauled, where he’d been hittin’ her with his cane——”

“You mean that your uncle had done such a thing as THAT!” exclaimed Miss Spence, suddenly disarmed by this scandal.

“Yes’m, and mamma and Margaret had to sit up all night nursin’ little Clara—and AUNT Clara was in such a state SOMEBODY had to keep talkin’ to HER, and there wasn’t anybody but me to do it, so I——”

“But where was your father?” she cried.

“Ma’am?”

“Where was your father while——”

“Oh—papa?” Penrod paused, reflected; then brightened. “Why, he was down at the train, waitin’ to see if Uncle John would try to follow ‘em and make ‘em come home so’s he could persecute ‘em some more. I wanted to do that, but they said if he did come I mightn’t be strong enough to hold him and——“ The brave lad paused again, modestly. Miss Spence’s expression was encouraging. Her eyes were wide with astonishment, and there may have been in them, also, the mingled beginnings of admiration and self-reproach. Penrod, warming to his work, felt safer every moment.

“And so,” he continued, “I had to sit up with Aunt Clara. She had some pretty big bruises, too, and I had to——”

which he had just discovered.

“But why didn’t they send for a doctor?” However, this question was only a flicker of dying incredulity.

“Oh, they didn’t want any DOCTOR,” exclaimed the inspired realist promptly. “They don’t want anybody to HEAR about it because Uncle John might reform—and then where’d he be if everybody knew he’d been a drunkard and whipped his wife and baby daughter?”

“Oh!” said Miss Spence.

“You see, he used to be upright as anybody,” he went on explanatively. “It all begun——”

“Began, Penrod.”

“Yes’m. It all commenced from the first day he let those travelling men coax him into the saloon.” Penrod narrated the downfall of his Uncle John at length. In detail he was nothing short of plethoric; and incident followed incident, sketched with such vividness, such abundance of colour, and such verisimilitude to a drunkard’s life as a drunkard’s life should be, that had Miss Spence possessed the rather chilling attributes of William J. Burns himself, the last trace of skepticism must have vanished from her mind. Besides, there are two things that will be believed of any man whatsoever, and one of them is that he has taken to drink. And in every sense it was a moving picture which, with simple but eloquent words, the virtuous Penrod set before his teacher.

His eloquence increased with what it fed on; and as with the eloquence so with self-reproach in the gentle bosom of the teacher. She cleared her throat with difficulty once or twice, during his description of his ministering night with Aunt Clara. “And I said to her, ‘Why, Aunt Clara, what’s the use of takin’ on so about it?’ And I said, ‘Now, Aunt Clara, all the crying in the world can’t make things any better.’ And then she’d just keep catchin’ hold of me, and sob and kind of holler, and I’d say, ‘DON’T cry, Aunt Clara—PLEASE don’t cry.”’

Then, under the influence of some fragmentary survivals of the respectable portion of his Sunday adventures, his theme became more exalted; and, only partially misquoting a phrase from a psalm, he related how he had made it of comfort to Aunt Clara, and how he had besought her to seek Higher guidance in her trouble.

The surprising thing about a structure such as Penrod was erecting is that the taller it becomes the more ornamentation it will stand. Gifted boys have this faculty of building magnificence upon cobwebs—and Penrod was gifted. Under the spell of his really great performance, Miss Spence gazed more and more sweetly upon the prodigy of spiritual beauty and goodness before her, until at last, when Penrod came to the explanation of his “just thinking,” she was forced to turn her head away.

“You mean, dear,” she said gently, “that you were all worn out and hardly knew what you were saying?”

“Yes’m.”

“And you were thinking about all those dreadful things so hard that you forgot where you were?”

“I was thinking,” he said simply, “how to save Uncle John.”

And the end of it for this mighty boy was that the teacher kissed him!

– from Penrod, by Booth Tarkington, Doubleday, Page & Co., NY, 1914