# The Red Book Magazine/Volume 39/Number 6/Young Love and Younger Crime

from The Red Book Magazine, Oct 1922, pp. 36–41, 94, 96, 98. Accompanying illustrations may be omitted.
The distinguished author of “”Penrod,” “Seventeen,” “Alice Adams,” and many other well-loved stories has here written in his happiest mood a delightful story of youth.
Young Love and Younger Crime
By Booth Tarkington
Illustrated by Arthur William Brown
A FEW years ago an international society of scientific men assembled in Turin to read intricate essays, make technical speeches and discuss matters so perplexing to the rest of us that we do not even know the names of them. However, there was one professor who made a speech that anybody could understand, and although what he said was horrifying, the scientific gentlemen nevertheless considered it worthy of their profound attention. He was an “authority,” a criminologist who had spent his life in the active study of his subject—that is to say, he was supposed to know what he was talking about. “It is necessary to recognize a fundamental truth,” he said, opening his discourse with a spinal shock: “All men are naturally criminal.”
Developing this theme, he went on to make the reasonable deductions. Since all men are subject alike to the criminal impulses, the only difference between actual criminals and other men is that the other men have learned to fear the consequences of following these impulses. Remove from any man all such fear, and the habits it has formed in him, and that man will certainly commit a few crimes; he may behave as badly as the worst Roman Emperor who felt himself above consequences. Of course the hope of reward is to be considered as a motive withholding men from crime, but the hope of a reward is only a form of fear. And thus, with infinite pains to avoid too much optimism, the Professor demonstrated himself, his colleagues and all the rest of us to be but base metal at bottom, no matter what angels' heads we show on the golden surface.
Now, if he is right, then of course we must expect to find criminal tendencies more strongly manifested in childhood than in the later ages when caution has been acquired; and whether the great criminologist be right or wrong, it is true that at least some children show what seems to be a native and instinctive leaning toward a life of crime. Certainly the case of fat Master Robert Eliot would go far to incline the open-minded to vote with the Professor.
At ten Robert had stopped short of murder, but only through good fortune. When little Laurence Coy one day snatched a doughnut that Robert was eating, the brick thrown by Robert at a distance of ten feet moved Master Coy's hair with the wind of its close passing; and if Laurence had stooped an inch the less, there would have been no Laurence. Moreover, in snatching the doughnut Laurence had but returned robbery for robbery. Fat Master Eliot, except when sluggish with too much eating, was the most expert food-snatcher of his circle. No child with candy, even with candy partly devoured, was safe within a block of him; he robbed passing fruit wagons, grocers' wagons, ice-cream carts, popcorn hoppers, peanut roasters; he had robbed a baby in a perambulator of its milk bottle. Moreover he stole, not “for the sport of it,” that stealing so often set forth as morally superior to stealing prompted by need or desire. When Robert stole food, he ate it.
Blackmail, swindling and obtaining money under false pretenses were among his more or less habitual crimes, though of course the Professor's theory is propped by the fact that these three felonies are practised by great numbers of children. “I'll tell on you,” the blackmailer shouts, and obtains concessions. How many parents have said: “Didn't I forbid you to buy any more soda? Didn't you make me think you wanted that dime for your little bank?” And almost every trading maneuver between two boys is an attempt to swindle on the part of both. “Innocent little things!” the observer exclaims, looking benignly upon the frolics of a children's party. Innocent of wrong, he means; but the Professor would shake his head and say: “No—innocent of right.”
Master Eliot's plump young face had the look of innocence; so much is certain, whether his innocence was of right or of wrong, or of both; and there is no doubt that he considered anything innocent that he wished to do. Punishment failed to shake this conviction, though of course it roused his anxiety and even sometimes deterred him from repeating a punishable action, when there was a prospect of detection. Thus, on the whole, the adults of the neighborhood in which he lived considered him a gourmand, but not characteristically a bad boy; and the children thought of him simply as “that ole fat Robert Eliot.” There was one person in the neighborhood, however, who saw Robert in a light wholly, different; and to this person's view there was a glamour about the fat boy's head. Robert had a pretty sister.
Illustration: “Dees keed,” the Sicilian thought proper to add, “he's a worse-dam stealer in a worse-dam town. I weesh to keel 'im.”
Upon a silent August afternoon the person who saw Robert in this favorable way was walking up the shady street on which they both lived, and he was thinking of Robert's sister, who had rejected him twice that week. He might have been more unhappy had she not also rejected him several times the week before, and somewhat frequently during the previous course of the summer; the blow was softened, in fact, by being but one of a series. Therefore this young Mr. Mears was not so lost in gloom as to be unable to take note of what went on about him; and at a corner not far from his place of residence, he halted and looked back, interested in a sudden outbreak of clamors behind him.
Halfway down the block a push-cart, laden with bananas and other fruit, stood deserted, for the moment, close by the gutter. The owner, a Sicilian of ardent appearance, uproariously pursued three pillagers, the chief of them a fat boy bearing off with him a large cluster of yellow bananas. The two other boys jumped a low hedge, ran across yards and disappeared, but the fat boy held his course straight up the street; and the banana-man, no doubt thinking him the easiest to catch, because of his fatness, followed him, bellowing. But the boy was as fleet as he was fat, and knew it; he was so sure of his escape, indeed, that as he ran he looked back over his shoulder, flourished the ravished bananas at their raving owner, taunted him, and called him “Wop” and “Dago.” But the fat boy should have kept his eyes ahead; for while he looked behind him, a large policeman was coming along the cross-street. The fat boy ran into him at the corner.
Thus Master Robert Eliot found himself at last in custody. His exhilarated and insulting expression was on the instant displaced by the look of one who cannot contemplate his position without a certain amount of horror; and the tumultuous arrival of the Sicilian appeared to disconcert him wholly. The policeman shook him: hot invectives scalded him and his ancestors; he had a sense of suffocation and beheld his future as mere chaos. On account of sudden overwhelming disabilities, both mental and vocal, he said nothing.
Then among the ruins of Master Eliot's young life appeared the neat figure of Mr. Renfrew Mears, but Robert regarded this advent as an additional calamity. Mr. Mears, he supposed, would be the bearer of evil tidings to the Eliot household; and the dimmed mind of the captive was but further darkened: it seemed to him dismally probable that Mr. Eliot would call at the penitentiary for the purpose of giving him a whipping. Then a dull hope began to smoke, and presently to flicker, in the breast of the fat boy. Renfrew, speaking in a low tone, was trying to open negotiations in his behalf.
The hope smoldered down and went out, for the policeman spoke loudly. “Let this here kid go, nothin'! Why, this here kid, he's got all these here rich North End kids so't they make life jest a burden to these here peddlers! This here kid, he's worse'n any kid downtown! He's on his way now, Mister. Cut it out!”
“Dees keed,” the Sicilian thought proper to add, “he's a worse-dam stealer in a worse-dam town. I weesh to keel 'im!”
“Well, but see here a minute,” Renfrew persisted. “Why, this boy's father's one of the most prominent—”
“Cut it out!” the policeman repeated. “This here push-cart man, he'll appear in court against him, wont he? Where'd I be if I didn't do my duty?”
“Oh!” said young Mr. Mears, enlightened, and took the push-cart man aside for a short private conference. A green bill passed unostentatiously from Renfrew's hand to the hand of the push-cart man, who at once became more amiable; then the policeman also had a word aside with the young gentleman, and they shook hands; after which the policeman coughed in a mollified way and allowed the hand that had shaken Renfrew's to remain closed for a moment; then he put it into his pocket and murmured affably: “Well, I reckon so.”
“You come on with me, Robert,” said Renfrew.
THE fat boy obeyed, though not with alacrity; he infinitely preferred to go on by himself, for he feared that he had but passed from one custody to another—from that of the policeman to that of Mr. Mears. “You come on with me,” was not wholly reassuring; Renfrew's tone of voice seemed noncommittal, and Robert's misgivings increased when he thought of the large sums of money spent in the mollification of the push-cart man and the policeman. So without gratitude and reluctantly, the fat boy walked beside his protector, and his condition was that of the many, in this world, who escape one calamity only to conjure up another before them. Robert's dismal conclusion was that he would be handed over to his parents for punishment, that Mr. Mears would give them an account of the recent horrible affair and make a demand for money expended. Robert began to sniffle.
“What's the matter?” Renfrew inquired.
“It—it aint right,” the fat boy said with a broken utterance. “It aint right; that's what's the—oh!—matter.”
“What isn't right?”
“Why, I wasn't doin' anything,” Robert explained miserably. “Anyways, I wasn't doin' anything more'n the rest of the boys were. If I'd gone an' sneaked off through that ole Mrs. Thompson's yard the way they did, why, all this wouldn't 'a' happened to me. It aint right I got to be punished an' them not, just because I kep' on down the sidewalk instead of jumpin' ole Mrs. Thompson's hedge. I'd like to know where there's any rightness about that!”
“Well, well,” Renfrew said absently, and made no further comment, not comprehending that Master Eliot was apprehensive of a punishment to come. He supposed that when Robert spoke of punishment, he meant the humiliation just undergone, his seizure and exposure upon the public highway by an officer of the peace.
“If I'd sneaked into that ole Mrs. Thompson's yard,” the boy continued, interrupting himself at intervals with a sob, “I wouldn't a' been in the fix I got in. He—he said I was worse'n the other boys. The only reason is I got caught an' they didn't!” Here he looked up at his tall companion with the watery gleam of a wretched hope. “You're goin' to tell on them, too, aint you?”
It was unfortunate that the absent-minded Renfrew failed to note the word “too.” “I didn't recognize them,” he said.
“They—they ought to suffer if—if I do,” Robert whimpered. “I got no more right to suffer'n they have. What business I got to stand everything and them not have anything happen to 'em at all?”
“Well, I don't know,” Mr. Mears responded vaguely, not realizing that pleading and argument were being addressed to him. “I think I saw your mother shopping downtown awhile ago,” he added. “But is—is your sister at home this afternoon, do you know, Robert?”
THIS inquiry was delivered with some hesitation, almost with timidity; but Robert was in no state of mind to comprehend any other person's state of mind, for he was one of those who become black pessimists in a black universe when apprehension once is roused. Moreover, as should be noted by those who love to substitute jargons for actualities, there is but one truly “class-conscious class” in the world. The others are artificial and therefore ephemeral, while children are class-conscious eternally. For them mankind consists of two classes: themselves and other people. And since Robert's sister belonged to the adult punishing-and-rewarding class and he was now the captive, as he believed of another member of that class, and also, through recent misfortune, subject to its arbitrary punishments, Robert could come to but one conclusion: that he was to be turned over to his sister and held in durance until his father and mother returned to the house. Thus, after an agony of suspense, probably endured in the darkness of a locked clothes-closet upstairs, other agonies would ensue and terrible things be done upon his tender body. Only once in his life had he been “severely punished,” and then for something far less compromising than the affair that had just involved him. Never, he felt, had matters reached so dreadful a crisis for him.
“Don't you know whether-your sister is at home or not, this afternoon, Robert?” Renfrew asked.
“She aint,” said Robert. “Nobody's home. She aint there.”
“Why, yes, she is!” the young man exclaimed, mildly surprised, for already they were not far from the house, and at that moment a vista through intervening shrubberies disclosed Miss Muriel Eliot in a wicker chair upon the broad veranda. “There she is now.”
“Doggone it!” Robert said thickly, and hung back.
“What did you say, Robert?”
“Never mind!” the fat boy muttered, halting outright; for the pretty white figure on the veranda was sheer doom to him, and he would advance no nearer to it of his own will.
Renfrew made an unfortunate gesture. He had brought Robert with him lest by some chance, remote but possible, the push-cart man or the fat boy, one or the other, or both, should renew hostile demonstrations after the departure of the policeman. But having reached the corner of the Eliots' spacious yard, Renfrew felt that his charge could be dismissed in safety; and what he had in mind to say to him was this: “Now, Robert, you're all right; so run along.” At the same time, with an affectionate impulse, possibly connected with his just then perceiving the graceful figure on the veranda, the young man put his hand on the fat boy's shoulder.
“Now, Robert—” he said, but was unable to conclude his little speech of dismissal.
Robert really struck out against the injustice of life as he found it. Those two other boys were to suffer nothing, and he everything. They were lean boys, far better equipped for martyrdom than he. He was of a delicate surface, yet plump in every part; there was thus the more of him to be switched; each stroke would sting inches and inches of him that did not even exist upon a lean boy. Yet they were to go free for no other reason than that they had sneaked through ole Mrs. Thompson's yard while he had frankly run up the open street and into a policeman! And now he felt Renfrew's hand upon his shoulder, obviously for the purpose of preventing any escape—that was the breaking-point for Robert. His desperation all at once became a frenzy.
He twisted away, his resentment for wrongs endured and wrongs prospective concentrating upon young Mr. Mears. “You lea' me alone, doggone you!” he said hoarsely.
“Why, Robert!”
“You shut up!”
“Why, Robert—” Renfrew began, and stepped toward the fat boy placatively. “Why, Robert, what—”
But Robert's emotion had reached a climax; he wept in the Berserk manner that comes upon boys in extremity. “I'll show you!”
With that he stooped, found a stone the size of a walnut, threw it with all his strength at his dumfounded protector's head, squawked, scrambled over the fence, and fled among the shrubberies of his own yard, disappearing there.
“Why, what—” said Renfrew, and stared vacantly down at the missile, which had come in sharp contact with his collar and then fallen at his feet. “Why, what in the world!”
MISS ELIOT, hurriedly abandoning her book and the veranda, seemed to echo his thought. “What on earth is the matter?” she cried as she came running down to the fence.
“That's what I'm wondering!”
Illustration: With a cold glance Muriel observed the disconsolate passage of Renfrew Mears to his own house across the street.
“But I thought I saw Robert throw a stone at you.”
“I thought so too!”
“What made him do such a thing?” she asked, much disturbed.
“I haven't an idea.”
“It seemed to me,” said Muriel, “that he gave a kind of scream. Then I looked up and saw him throw a stone at you and run away. He was crying.”
“Why, yes.”
“But what happened?”
“Nothing at all,” said Renfrew. “We were just walking along together, and he seemed all at once to go a little crazy.”
“But what made him?”
“That's what I can't understand. He just broke out without any reason at all.”
“Was he playing out here?”
“No,” said Renfrew. “I met him a little way down the street, and we walked along together; that was all.”
“How strange!” she murmured, and her frown of perplexity deepened. “What was he doing when you met him?”
“When I met him?” Renfrew repeated, and to her surprise he looked rather embarrassed; a little additional color came into his cheeks. “Oh, nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all, in fact. Ah—I believe he was playing with some other boys, but he decided to come with me.”
There was a disingenuousness in his voice; his embarrassment was slight but evident, though she did not consciously think about this at the moment, being too much occupied with problem of the strange assault itself. “I never knew him to do anything so queer before,” she said. “You say he left the other boys because he preferred to come and walk with you, and then, as you were just quietly walking along, he turned all at once into a little demon and threw a stone at you?”
“Oh, not quite that: he didn't exactly seem to be a little demon. He seemed—he seemed to be upset with me over something, but I don't know what it could have been. About the only thing I said to him was to ask him if he knew whether you were at home this afternoon. He said you weren't, and the next minute he—well, that was when he got so upset.”
“I never knew him to behave so outrageously!” Muriel exclaimed. “I'll see that he's properly disciplined for it.”
“Oh, I don't believe I would,” said the good-natured Renfrew. “We were just walking along together, but his nerves may have been on a strain for some reason or other—you never can tell. If I were you, I wouldn't say anything to your father about it, or to Robert, either.”
“Indeed, I shall!”
“I don't believe I would,” Renfrew urged gently, and then, abandoning the puzzle of the fat boy's outbreak as insoluble, the young man brightened with the renewal of a thought that had been in his mind before the assault. “Well,” he said, “since you are at home, Muriel, would you mind if I came in for a little while?”
She shook her head. “I'm afraid I have a great many things to do.”
“Couldn't you talk to me a little while first, Muriel? I wanted to tell you something I thought of after I went home last night.”
But again she shook her head. “It seemed to me that you did tell me everything you could possibly think of, before you left.”
“No, I didn't, Muriel,” he insisted. “No, I didn't. After I went home, I decided to do something radical.”
“Radical?” she laughed incredulously.
“Yes. Do you remember the last thing I said, just before I went home?”
“I think so,” she replied coldly. “I think you said you intended to go away and stay until you felt differently about me.”
“Yes,” he acquiesced. “I told you I thought I'd better travel until I got so I didn't care so much about you. Well, after I went home and thought it over, I decided I wouldn't. I decided to stay here and keep on feeling the way I do.”
“Good gracious!” she cried. “Do you call that 'radical'?”
“Yes,” he replied promptly. “Considering how I do feel, I think it was a pretty radical decision. I'd like you to understand how I feel, Muriel. When I look at you in that pretty dress and with that lovely little hat over your eyes—your beautiful eyes, Muriel—”
“Good-by!” she said. “I really can't hear all that again, today!”
Straightway, she walked decisively across the lawn and went back to her chair on the veranda, but did not sit down. Instead she stood and with a cold side-glance observed the disconsolate passage of Renfrew Mears to his own house across the street. His air was a drooping one, expressive of a meek gloominess which she found not at all to her taste. “If I were a man,” she thought, “I wouldn't keep poking around day after day, trying to make love to a girl who snubbed me every time she saw me. I'd do something to make her like me—I'd just carry her off her feet!”
However, Muriel did not go into details or describe to herself just how this was to be done; her musing skipped to the sequel, which consisted not of words, but of a less-than-instantaneous imagining, in picture: a laughing cavalier leaned from a galloping horse and wafted her to his saddle-bow. This sketch, so brief and indistinct, gave way to one more definite and detainable, for it had just been implanted in her memory: the picture of a fat little boy hurling a missile at a tall young man and running amuck without provocation. “What could have been the matter with Robert?” she thought. He was as sane as most boys are, and no sane person, not even a boy, could conduct himself so bitterly without even a fancied provocation. Yet he and Renfrew Mears were “just walking along together,” Renfrew said. But had Renfrew been altogether frank? Had he told her everything? He had seemed puzzled, but he was also rather embarrassed. “It's all very, very queer!” she thought, and recalling the disingenuousness in his voice, she frowned. Still frowning, she decided to search for Robert and solve the mystery.
He was not in his own room, whither she went first: so she looked through the house, including the attic in her search, for he often went there, as she knew. Descending, she made sure that he was nowhere in the yard, nor in the garage, nor up in a tree; then she inquired of the cook if he had been near the kitchen, and was told that he had, only a few minutes earlier. in a state, visibly and audibly of agitation, he had raided a large box of crackers in the pantry, while the cook, touched by a display of emotion, affected a preoccupatoin with the range.
“Yes'm,” she said, “I honest felt sorry for Mister Robert for once! He was a-snifflin' and a-cryin' to himself so kind of pitiful that I went and pretended I never seen him at all and jest kep' lookin' in the oven. He filled his pockets, and his mouth too, I could tell by the stuffy way he was cryin', and the crumbs that was all over the pantry when he'd went. He took about thirty, I figger.”
“Where did he go?”
“Climbed out the pantry window,” said the cook, “sniffin' and chokin' all the time.”
Illustration: “I am answering,” he responded in a voice sick with apprehension. “You lea' me alone.”
Muriel went outdoors again, but Robert was not to be discovered there; and concluding that he had taken his crackers and his strange misery to some outlying and unguessable part of the neighborhood, she went back into the house by way of the kitchen, and ascended the back stairs, intending to go to her own room. In the upper hall she passed the attic stairway and noted with an absent-minded slight satisfaction that she had been so thoughtful as to close the door when she had come down from the attic, a little while before. Then she halted, for upon the floor a little trail of crumbs led to that door, and these crumbs were distinctly fragments of the ordinary American cracker. It appeared that in his grief Robert had been subtle; he had gone out by one window and had come in by another.
Muriel opened the door softly and listened. From above, through a clear space of silence, there came a sound, infinitely little, of a mastication not so crisply purposeful as to be mouselike; then there was an impulsive louder sound, gulpish and vocal; and these two varieties of sounds were repeated, appeared to be going on continuously. Somewhere above, there was manifestly a human being—a human being who wept and ate simultaneously.
Muriel ascended the stairs, and with her first footstep all other sounds ceased. “Robert!” she called, when she reached the top. “Robert, where are you?”
Her inquiry was explicable, for she knew Robert to be present, but a look about her gave her no information. Nothing appeared to have been disturbed since her previous visit to the attic, so short a time before, and everything was in order; for this attic, though spacious, was neat. It contained what is customary in the way of disused everything, but the trunks were locked; the two cedar chests were closed, as were the four or five packing cases, and a single glance round so orderly an attic surveyed the whole of it and revealed no possible hiding-place for anything that had to breathe; whereas Robert was almost notorious for his breathing, and his sister daily requested him to stop his awful puffing.
“Robert,” she said, “I want you to answer me. I know you're here, so there's no use your pretending not to be. Where are you?”
The silence that followed was a thorough one.
“Robert,” she said, “I want you to answer me this minute!”
Again but echo answered, and Robert held his peace.
“Now,” said Muriel, “I'm going to find you, if I have to take up the floor!”
Measures so extreme were not necessary, as she discovered when her enunciation of the word “floor” automatically brought her eyes to rest upon the thing her lips described with the word. Upon the swept planks were new crumbs, and most of the crumbs were near a large packing-case made of thin unpainted boards. Muriel went at once to where it stood against the wall, but finding the top nailed tightly down, she was amazed. Nevertheless, there were the crumbs. “Robert,” she said, “you're in this box. I don't know how you got in, but you're coming out. Do you hear me?”
Robert declined to reply.
“I'll find you!” she said grimly, and since the box appeared to be intact on all its visible surfaces, she concluded that there must be an aperture on the side that stood against the wall. “I'll find you!” she repeated, and began to tug at the case, to get it out from the wall. She put all of her strength into the effort, and was so surprised by an unexpected yielding under her hands that she had difficulty in saving herself from a fall. The whole end of the box came away, for the nails had been removed from their sockets, and what had held it in place was merely a bit of old rope, fastened upon the inner side. The rope had slipped through the detaining fingers of Robert, who was inside the box, weeping among his crackers and the clothing of a deceased uncle.
“Come out!”
Muriel spoke sternly, and he obeyed, standing in a feeble attitude before her and resuming the slow consumption of crackers dampened by tears.
“What made you behave so outrageously to Mr. Mears?”
Robert looked at her wetly. “Who?” he said.
“I saw you throw that stone at Mr. Mears. What did you do it for?”
“When?”
“Robert!” she said dangerously. “Answer me!”
“I am answering,” he responded in a voice sick with apprehension. “You lea' me alone.”
“What did you do it for?”
“Well, he told you,” Robert whimpered. “Didn't he?”
“No, he didn't.”
“Honest?” said Robert.
“He said you and he were just walking along together, and you threw a stone at him without any reason at all. For that matter, I've already told you I saw you myself. Why did you do it?”
“Where'd he say—where'd he say I was?”
“'Where'? Don't you understand that I saw it myself? Right by our fence.”
“No,” said Robert, gulping painfully. “I mean before that. Where'd he say I was when—when we began to walk along together?”
“He didn't say just where. He said you were playing with some boys, but came and joined him and walked home with him.”
A gleam came into the fat boy's eyes; hope touched his bosom with a little warmth. “Honest, is that all?” he asked.
“Certainly. What's that got to do with your behaving as you did?”
“Well—” said Robert, and paused, his tears drying as hope grew. This fat boy's mind could do only one thing at a time, and had no proper foresight. Occupied entirely with securing his safety from moment to moment, like a mountain-climber finding one foothold at a a time on perilous ice, Robert merely perceived that Renfrew Mears had not yet given testimony against him, and tried to get what advantage he could out of the postponement. He felt no gratitude to Renfrew; for his resentment had found time to crystallize, so to speak, and he was now too busy to survey the facts in the case with a cool head. “Well—it wasn't my fault,” he said.
“Then what made you do such a wicked thing?”
Robert's sniffling began again, though lightly, and not inspired by sincere feeling, for it was now a gesture to create sympathy. “I guess you'd 'a' done just what I did, if you'd 'a' been in my place,” he said, following an impulse without knowing where it would take him.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well, I guess you would!” he said. “You would if you'd 'a' been me.”
“You must tell me why,” Muriel insisted. “Just repeating that I 'would' doesn't mean anything, and it doesn't excuse you. When Papa comes—”
Stung by this ominous mention of his parent, he interrupted her loudly: “He would, too! If it'd 'a' been Papa, he'd 'a' done just what I did!”
“Shame on you, Robert: to say Papa would have thrown a stone at—”
“He would!” the fat boy insisted doggedly; and then, feeling the pressure for greater plausibility, he added: “He would, if that ole Renfrew Mears had 'a' done to Papa what he did to me.”
“Robert!” she exclaimed. “Don't you dare tell such stories! I saw you, and Mr. Mears didn't do anything to you at all.”
“Well, maybe he didn't, but he did!” Robert returned, hard pushed. “I mean it was somep'n he said to me. If a person calls you names an' everything, it's just the same as doin' somep'n to you, isn't it?”
“Shame!” Muriel said. “To think anyone could believe that Mr. Mears called you names! If you go on making up stories—”
“I didn't!” Robert shouted. “I didn't say he called me names: II said if he did! I only said it was somep'n he said to me; I didn't say it was names.”
“What did he say to you?”
“Well, he said—he said—”
“Go on. What did he say?”
“He said—” Here Robert paused again, his powers of invention struggling within him, but hanging fire. “He said—he said—he said—”
“I don't think he said anything.”
“He did too!” Robert cried, and to his darkened and desperate mind there came just then a feeble gleam. “He said somep'n about you.”
“I don't believe it,” Muriel replied.
“He did!” And now an idea exploded in the fat boy's brain. “He said he didn't like you and he was goin' to marry you to get even!”
“What!” Muriel cried.
Robert amplified it. “He did! He said nobody else liked you either, and he hated you so much he was goin' to marry you so he could make you do whatever he wanted to, and make you wash his clo'es. He said every word I—”
“That's enough of such nonsense!” Muriel interrupted sharply; yet she spoke not altogether with conviction and felt a queer disquietude. Robert made his assertion with an earnestness not far short of passion; and there was that singular scene by the fence, still fresh in her mind's eye: the boy's outburst against Renfrew without any cause—unless the cause was indeed something that Renfrew had said; and there was also Renfrew's odd embarrassment afterward. What had he said? Robert might easily have mistaken his meaning; and no doubt whatever Renfrew said to so juvenile a listener had been intended jocularly. But she began to believe that he had said something—and probably it was not wholly unlike what the fat boy had so vehemently reported, and in atrocious taste at the best! And even supposing that it was meant jocularly, was not her little brother right after all, in resenting a flippant mention of her—a careless “joke” about marrying her! For he must have said something about marrying; the child couldn't have misunderstood the word itself. Muriel was touched: she had never before thought that Robert cared for her so deeply, nor suspected him of so much chivalry.
“Don't you b'lieve me?” he inquired piteously.
“Let's go downstairs, dear,” she said in a gentle tone. “You must run and wash your face. We wont say any more about this—not to Papa or Mamma, or anybody.” As she spoke, there was a brightness in her eyes and a compression about her lips. Indignation was beginning to seethe, and before Muriel and Robert had completed their descent of the attic stairway, the resentment against Renfrew Mears felt by the little brother was not comparable to that now rising within the breast of the big sister.
Dinner at the Eliot table that evening was unusually quiet: neither the daughter nor the son spoke, except upon occasion. Robert had a gentle air, however; his manner was deferential beyond all filial necessity: never had he looked so pure; and he was at unusual pains to eat inaudibly. Muriel's expression, on the contrary, wore no such softness to recommend it;her eyes had the brilliancy of brooding anger, her cheeks the smoldering color that may come from a wrath that awaits its moment.
The moment arrived almost immediately after she left the table. Going out to the veranda alone, she halted abruptly, for there in the late twilight came Renfrew, just entering the gate. “I thought maybe you wouldn't mind,” he said in his apologetic way. “If I promised not to say your eyes are beautiful, could you stand me a little while, Muriel—please?”
As he finished this plaintive inquiry, his foot was on the veranda steps, to ascend; but he became motionless upon her reply, which was of a simplicity all too startlingly eloquent.
“No!”
He looked at her, passed his hand over his suddenly troubled forehead, and after a moment, asked gravely: “Is something unusual the matter?”
“Yes!” she said, in the same manner in which she had said, “No!”
“What is it?”
She came to the top of the steps, standing thus a few feet above him. “Robert told me why he did what he did this afternoon,” she said. “I think he was right.”
“Right?” the mystified young man echoed vaguely. “I think I've figured out why he did it, myself, though I didn't see it at the time, and if he's told you about it, there's no harm in my explaining, I suppose. He must have thought I was making him go along with me, and when I put my hand on his shoulder, he probably thought I was going to turn him over to you for punishment.”
Naturally, she misunderstood. “Oh, you wanted him punished?” she cried.
“No, I didn't,” poor Renfrew explained, his mystification naturally not lessened. “But I supposed his father certainly would, if he heard about it.”
“Then you supposed a mistake!” she returned quickly. “My father wont hear about it, if you care to know, but if I were you, I'd consider it quite sufficient that I know about it.” There was a catch in her voice that stopped her for a moment; then she said: “You asked me if I could 'stand' you for a little while, and I told you, 'No!' I mean that for any little while at any time hereafter!”
“Muriel—”
“Good-by!”
“But I don't see—” he began. “I don't understand. The whole thing isn't a matter to be so sensitive about.”
“'Sensitive!'” she cried. “Good-by!”
“Muriel—”
“Good-by!” she said fiercely. “I mean it!”
He looked at her, shook his head resignedly, then sighed, said “All right!”—and went back across the street.
He did not quite disappear from her sight, however, for a little later as she sat, still smoldering, in a chair on the veranda, the dusk was not too deep to reveal a pair of white flannel trousers fitfully pacing the lawn under a big walnut tree across the way. “Good-by!” she murmured angrily. “Good-by, thank heaven!”
THEN, as she sat there, thus bitterly inimical, she took note of another figure that hovered in the dusk. This was a much smaller one, nearer her, and deporting itself peculiarly. It was that of a little boy, not so tall as Robert and incomparably slenderer; and he seemed strangely driven by some uneasiness in the falling night. Evidently the lady on the veranda, partly screened by the railing. was invisible to him, for it was not conceivable that he would do what he did if he knew himself under the eye of a spectator.
When Muriel first observed him, he was outside the fence and seemed to be on his hands and knees, peering between the pickets. Then he rose, walked away, came back, and climbed over the fence. Once in the yard, he approached the house on tiptoe; and then in a sudden causeless alarm, he fled over the fence and down the street like a panic-stricken rabbit. Five minutes later he was back again and did precisely the same thing—and once more returned. This time he hung about in still obvious nervousness, walking up and down, but finally he halted at the gate—not, however, with a mind to open it and come in. Instead, he climbed to the top of one of the gate-posts, standing thus pedestaled until Muriel perceived, by the stretching of his neck in various directions, that he was trying to gain a better view of the interior of the house. A faint light reached him here, from the open doors of the broad central hall, and she recognized him as little Laurence Coy, nine years of age, and at times a follower of Robert's. She spoke to him.
“Laurence!” she called.
At that moment, as it happened, Laurence was standing upon one leg, for he was using the other as an outflung weight to balance him in an effort to see through a window too remote to be practicable for his purpose. His name, called distinctly from a region he had supposed uninhabited, unnerved him quite. He immediately fell from the gate-post, and came to rest at full length upon the grass, just inside the fence. Muriel reached him before he was able to rise.
“You poor child!” she cried. “Are you hurt, Laurence?”
He moaned faintly, but got to his feet without disclosing any breakage. “No'm,” he said, and turned to depart at once. “Well, good night,” he said hurriedly.
“Wait,” she said, detaining him. “Were you looking for Robert?”
To her surprise he instantly protested with what seemed a quite needless vehemence. “No, I'm not!” he said. “I wouldn't do it! I mean, no'm, I wasn't lookin' for Robert the last of anybody! Well, good night.” He turned again to go, and again she detained him.
“Wait,” she said. “Robert is in the house. Papa and Mamma are talking to him now, I think, but—”
“They are?” he said, interrupting her nervously. “Good night!”
“Wait, Laurence! He's in the library with them, I think, but if you—”
“No'm,” he assured her with increased emphasis. “I didn't have anything on earth to do with it, and I don't want to see him, and I didn't have anything to do with it, no matter how many times he tells his papa and mamma I did!” Then, edging away from her suspiciously, he added: “That's all I was kind o' hangin' around here for.”
“What was?” she asked.
“To see if he did tell his father and mother on me. Did he?”
“Well,” she said, being prompted to indirectness by an increasing curiosity, “what if he did, Laurence?”
In the darkness Laurence swallowed nothing so hard that the swallowing could be heard. “Well, if he did, and they're comin' over to our house to tell my father and mother about it,” he said, “I might as well tell 'em first, because I didn't have a thing to do with the whole biznuss, and I was just walkin' along with Robert and Tommy Clune, and they did the whole biznuss before I could say a word to stop 'em, and I didn't even get a single banana or anything. And I can prove it by Mr. Mears, because he saw the whole biznuss and knows all about it.”
“About what?”
“About Robert's gettin' arrested,” said Laurence simply. “For stealin', I mean.”
RETURNING for a moment to the Criminological Congress at Turin, the Professor was of course either right or wrong about the natural-born criminality of all of us, and only a final item in the case here presented seems further to point toward his correctness. In supposing that his fat friend was already on trial in the library, little Laurence Coy merely anticipated the event. Ten minutes after the conclusion of Laurence's talk with the lady at the gate, he reached his own house and entered it with the serenest confidence; but the trial without jury of his fat friend was now under way.
Robert offered to cross his heart as testimony to his own innocence, re-incriminated his rescuer of the afternoon, broke down under questioning, claimed to have been forced into his misdeed by those two experienced nine-year-old scoundrels Laurence Coy and Tommy Clune, and then (though vainly) retracted his whole confession just outside the door of the starlit garage. No doubt the Professor would have nodded, greatly pleased.
But it is a matter of doubt what he would say if some one maintained in his presence the view that the results of crime may be ineffable. More than that, they may be of permanent good and of enduring happiness. For these were indeed the results of the fat boy's crimes, as Renfrew Mears was able to predict that very evening. At the end of a line of pacing that led him deep into the shadows of his back yard, he turned to discover that a graceful lady had crossed the street and was awaiting him under his own walnut tree.
Then he proposed to her for the last time.
   Readers of Mr. Tarkington's delightful stories of the courtship of Muriel and Renfrew will rejoice to know that the next story in the series will appear in an early issue. Though Renfrew Proposes to Muriel in the present number “for the last time,” one cannot but feel that there's plenty of time left for slipping.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1946, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 77 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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