# Penrod and the Pageant

Extracted from Everybody's magazine, Sept 1916, pp. 738–751. Accompanying illustrations may be omitted.
PENROD and the PAGEANT
       by
BOOTH TARKINGTON
AUTHOR OF “THE FLIRT,” “MONSIEUR BEAUCAIRE,” ETC.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY B. CORY KILVERT
PENROD SCHOFIELD sat morosely upon the back fence and gazed with envy at Duke, his wistful dog.
A bitter soul dominated the various curved and angular surfaces known by a careless world as the face of Penrod Schofield. Except in solitude, that face was almost always cryptic and emotionless; for Penrod approached his teens wearing an expression carefully trained to be inscrutable. Since the world was sure to misunderstand everything, pure defensive instinct prompted him to give it as little as possible to lay hold upon. Nothing is more impenetrable than the face of a boy who has learned this, and Penrod's was habitually as fathomless as the depth of his hatred this morning for the literary activities of Mrs. Lora Rewbush—an almost universally respected fellow citizen, a lady of charitable and poetic inclinations, and one of his own mother's most intimate friends.
Mrs. Lora Rewbush had written something which she called “The Children's Pageant of the Table Round;” and it was to be performed in public that very afternoon at the Women's Arts and Guild Hall, for the benefit of the Colored Infants Betterment Society. And if any flavor of sweetness remained in the nature of Penrod Schofield, after the dismal trials of the school-week just past, that problematic, infinitesimal remnant was made pungent acid by the imminence of his destiny to form a prominent feature of the spectacle, and to declaim the loathsome sentiments of a character named upon the program the Child Sir Lancelot.
After each rehearsal he had plotted escape, and only ten days earlier there had been a glimmer of light: Mrs. Lora Rewbush caught a very bad cold, and it was hoped it might develop into pneumonia; but she recovered so quickly that not even a rehearsal of the Children's Pageant was postponed. Darkness closed in. Penrod had rather vaguely debated plans for a self-mutilation such as would make his appearance as the Child Sir Lancelot inexpedient on public grounds; it was a heroic and attractive thought, but the results of some extremely sketchy preliminary experiments had caused him to abandon it.
There was no escape; and at last his hour was hard upon him. Therefore he brooded on the fence and gazed with envy at his wistful Duke.
The dog's name was undescriptive of his person, which was obviously the result of a singular series of mésalliances. He wore a grizzled mustache and indefinite whiskers; he was small and shabby, and looked like an old postman. Penrod envied Duke because he was sure Duke would never be compelled to be a Child Sir Lancelot. He thought a dog free and unshackled, to go or come, as the wind listeth. Penrod forgot the life he led Duke.
There was a long soliloquy upon the fence, a plaintive monologue without words: the boys thoughts were adjectives, but they were expressed by a running film of pictures in his mind's eye, morbidly prophetic of the hideosities before him. Finally he spoke aloud, with such spleen that Duke rose from his haunches and lifted one ear in keen anxiety.
“'I hight Sir Lancelot du Lake, the Child,
Gentul-hearted, meek, and mild.
What though I'm but a littul child,
Gentul-heartud, meek, and——' Oof!”
All of this except the “oof” was a quotation from the Child Sir Lancelot, as conceived by Mrs. Lora Rewbush. Choking upon it, Penrod slid down from the fence, and with slow and thoughtful steps entered a one-storied wing of the stable, consisting a single apartment, floored with cement and used as a storeroom for broken bric-à-brac, old paint-buckets, decayed garden-hose, worn-out carpets, dead furniture, and other condemned odds and ends not yet considered hopeless enough to be given away.
In one corner stood a large box, a part of the building itself: it was eight feet high and open at the top, and it had been constructed as a sawdust magazine from which was drawn material for the horse's bed in a stall on the other side of the partition. The big box, so high and towerlike, so commodious, so suggestive, had ceased to fulfil its legitimate function; though, providentially, it had been at least half full of sawdust when the horse died. Two years had gone by since that passing; an interregnum in transportation during which Penrod's father was “thinking” (he explained sometimes) of an automobile. Meanwhile, the gifted and generous sawdust-box had served brilliantly in war and peace: it was Penrod's stronghold.
There was a partially defaced sign upon the front wall of the box; this donjon-keep had known mercantile impulses:
The O. K. RaBiT Co. PENROD ScHoFiELD aND Co. iNQuiRE FOR PRicEs
This was a venture of the preceding vacation, and had netted, at one time, an accrued and owed profit of $1.38. Prospects had been brightest on the very eve of cataclysm. The storeroom was locked and guarded, but twenty-seven rabbits and Belgian hares, old and young, had perished here on a single night—through no human agency, but in a foray of cats, the besiegers treacherously tunneling up through the sawdust from the small aperture which opened into the stall beyond the partition. Commerce has its martyrs.
A BITTER SOUL DOMINATED THE FACE OF PENROD SCHOFIELD.
Penrod climbed upon a barrel, stood on tiptoe, grasped the rim of the box; then, using a knot-hole as a stirrup, threw one leg over the top, drew himself up, and dropped within. Standing upon the packed sawdust, he was just tall enough to see over the top.
Duke had not followed him into the storeroom, but remained in the open doorway in a concave and pessimistic attitude. Penrod felt in a dark corner of the box and laid hands upon a simple apparatus consisting of an old bushel-basket with a few yards of clothes-line tied to each of its handles. He passed the ends of the lines over a big spool which revolved upon an axle of wire suspended from a beam overhead and, with the aid of this improvised pulley, lowered the empty basket until it came to rest in an upright position upon the floor of the storeroom at the foot of the sawdust box.
“Eleva-ter!” shouted Penrod. “Ting-ting!”
Duke, old and intelligently apprehensive, approached slowly, in a semi-circular manner, deprecatingly, but with courtesy. He pawed the basket delicately; then, as if that were all his master had expected of him, uttered one bright bark, sat down, and looked up triumphantly. His hypocrisy was shallow: many a horrible quarter of an hour had taught him his duty in this matter.
“El-e-vay-ter!” shouted Penrod sternly. “You want me to come down there to you?”
Duke looked suddenly haggard. He pawed the basket feebly again and, upon another outburst from on high, prostrated himself flat and gave a superb impersonation of a worm.
“You get in that el-e-vay-ter!”
Reckless with despair, Duke jumped into the basket, landing in a disheveled posture, which he did not alter until he had been drawn up and poured out upon the floor of sawdust within the box. There, shudderingly, he lay in doughnut shape and, presently, slumbered.
It was dark in the box, a condition that might have been remedied by sliding back a small wooden panel on runners, which would have let in ample light from the alley; but Penrod Schofield had of late ceased to avail himself of this. He knelt, and from a former soap-box, in a corner, took a lantern without a chimney, and a large oil-can; the leak in the latter being so nearly imperceptible that its banishment from household use had seemed to Penrod as inexplicable it as providential.
He shook the lantern near his ear: nothing splashed; there was no sound but a dry clinking. But there was plenty of kerosene in the can; and he filled the lantern, striking a match to illumine the operation. Then he lit the lantern and hung it upon a nail against the wall. The sawdust floor was slightly impregnated with oil, and the open flame quivered in suggestive proximity to the side of the box; however, some rather deep charrings of the plank against which the lantern hung offered evidence that the arrangement was by no means a new one, and indicated at least a possibility of no fatality occurring this time.
Penrod turned up the surface of the sawdust at about the center of the floor, and drew forth a cigar-box in which were half a dozen cigarettes, made of hayseed and thick brown wrapping-paper, a lead-pencil, an eraser, and a small note-book; the cover of which was labeled in his own handwriting:
“English Grammar, Penrod Schofield—Room 6, Ward School Nomber Seventh.”
The first page of this book was purely academic; but the study of English undefiled terminated with a slight jar at the top of the second: “Nor must an adverb be used to modif——”
Immediately followed:
“HaRoLD RaMoREZ THE RoaDaGENT or Wild life among The Rockies.”
And the subsequent entries in the book appeared to have little concern with Room 6, Ward School Number Seventh.
The author of “Harold Ramorez,” etc., lit one of the hayseed cigarettes, seated himself comfortably, with his back against the wall and his right shoulder just under the lantern, elevated his knees to support the note-book, turned to a blank page, and wrote, slowly and earnestly:
“CHAPITER THE SIXTH.”
He took a knife from his pocket and broodingly, his eyes upon the inward embryos of vision, sharpened his pencil. After that, he extended a foot and meditatively rubbed Duke's back with the side of his shoe. Creation, with Penrod, did not leap, full-armed, from the brain; but finally he began to produce. He wrote very slowly at first, and then with increasing rapidity; faster and faster, gathering momentum and growing more and more fevered as he sped, till at last the true fire came, without which no lamp of real literature may be made to burn.
“ELEVA-TER!” SHOUTED PENROD. “TING-TING!” RECKLESS WITH DESPAIR, DUKE JUMPED IN.
Mr. Wilson reched for his gun but our hero had him covered and soon said Well I guess you dont come any of that on me my freind.
Well what makes you so sure about it sneered the other bitting his lip so savageley that the blood ran You are nothing but a comon Roadagent any way and I do not propose to be bafled by such, Ramorez laughed at this and kep Mr Wilson covered by his ottomatick.
Soon the two men were struggling together in the deathroes but soon Mr Wilson got him bound and gaged his mouth and went away for awhile leavin our hero, it was dark and he writhd at his bonds writhing on the floor wile the rats came out of their holes and bit him and vernim got all over him from the floor of that helish spot but soon he manged to push the gag out of his mouth with the end of his toungeu and got all his bonds off
Soon Mr Wilson came back to tant him with his helpless condition flowed by his gang of detectives and they said Oh look at Ramorez sneering at his plight and tanted him with his helpless condition because Ramorez had put the bonds back sos he would look the same but could throw them off him when he wanted to Just look at him now sneered they. To hear him talk you would thought he was hot stuff and they said Look at him now him that was going to do so much. Oh I would not like to be in his fix.
Soon Harold got mad at this and jumped up with blasing eyes throwin off his bonds like they were air Ha Ha sneered he I guess you better not talk so much next time Soon there flowed another awful struggle and siezin his ottomatick back from Mr Wilson he shot two of the detectives through the heart Bang Bang went the ottomatick and two more went to meet their Maker Only two detectives left now and so he stabbed one and the scondrel went to meet his Maker for now our hero was fighting for his very life. It was dark in there now for night had falen and a terrible view met the eye Blood was just all over everything and the rats were eatin the dead men.
Soon our hero manged to get his back to the wall for he was fighting for his very life now and shot Mr Wilson through the abodmen Oh said Mr Wilson you —— —— —— (The dashes are Penrod's.)
Mr Wilson stagerd back vile oaths soilin his lips for he was in pain Why you —— —— you sneered he I will get you yet——you Harold Ramorez
The remainin scoundrel had an ax which he came near our heros head with but missed him and remand stuck in the wall Our heros amunition was exausted what was he to do, the remanin scondrel would soon get his ax lose so our hero sprung froward and bit him till his teeth met in the flech for now our hero was fighting for his very life At this the remanin scondrel also cursed and swore vile oaths Oh sneered he —— —— —— you Harold Ramorez what did you bite me for Yes sneered Mr Wilson also and he has shot me in the abodmen too the —— —— —— ——
Soon they were both cursin and reviln him together Why you —— —— —— —— —— sneered they what did you want to injure us for——you Harold Ramorez you are no better than anybody else and you are a —— —— —— —— —— ——
Soon our hero could stand this no longer If you could learn to act like gentlmen said he I would not do any more to you now and your low vile exppresions have not got any effect on me only to injure your own self when you go to meet your Maker Oh I guess you have had enogh for one day and I think you have learned a lesson and will not soon atemp to beard Harold Ramorez again so with a tanting lauugh he cooly lit a cigarrete and takin the keys of the cell from Mr Wilson's poket went on out.
Soon Mr Wilson and the wonded detective manged to bind up their wonds and got up off the floor —— —— it I will have that dasstads life now sneered they if we have to swing for it —— —— —— —— him he shall not eccape us again the low down —— —— —— —— ——
Chapiter seventh
A mule train of heavily laden burros laden with gold from the mines was to be seen wandering among the highest clifts and gorgs of the Rocky Mts and a tall man with a long silken mustash could be heard cursin vile oaths-because he well knew this was the lair of Harold Ramorez Why —— —— —— you you —— —— —— —— mules you sneered he because the poor mules were not able to go any quicker —— you I will show you Why —— —— —— —— —— it sneered he his oaths growing viler and viler I will whip you —— —— —— —— —— —— —— you sos you will not be able to walk for a week you —— —— you mean old —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— mules
Scarcly had the vile words left his lips when——
“Penrod!”
It was his mothers voice, calling from the back porch.
Simultaneously, the noon whistles began to blow far and near; and the romancer in the sawdust-box, summoned prosaically from far mountain passes above the clouds, paused with stubby pencil half-way from lip to knee. His eyes were shining: there was a rapt sweetness in his gaze. As he wrote his burden had grown lighter; thoughts of Mrs. Lora Rewbush had almost left him; and in particular as he recounted (even by the chaste dash) the annoyed expressions of Mr. Wilson, the wounded detective, and the silken mustached mule-driver, he had felt mysteriously relieved concerning the Child Sir Lancelot. Altogether he looked a better and a brighter boy.
“Pen-rod!”
The rapt look faded slowly. He sighed, but moved not.
“Pen-rod! Were having lunch early just on your account, so you'll have plenty of time to be dressed for the pageant. Hurry!”
There was silence in Penrod's aerie.
“Pen-rod!”
Mrs. Schofield's voice sounded nearer, indicating a threatened approach. Penrod bestirred himself: he blew out the lantern, and shouted plaintively:
“Well, ain't I coming fast's I can?”
“Do hurry,” returned the voice, withdrawing, and the kitchen door could be heard to close.
Languidly, Penrod proceeded to set his house in order.
Replacing his manuscript and pencil in the cigar-box, he carefully buried the cigar-box in the sawdust, put the lantern and oil-can back in the soap-box, adjusted the elevator for the reception of Duke, and, in no uncertain tone, invited the devoted animal to enter.
Duke stretched himself amiably, affecting not to hear; and when this pretense became so obvious that even a dog could keep it up no longer, sat down in a corner, facing it, his back to his master, and his head perpendicular, nose upward, supported by the convergence of the two walls. This, from a dog, is the last word, the comble of the immutable. Penrod commanded; stormed; tried gentleness; persuaded with honeyed words and pictured rewards. Dukes eyes looked backward; otherwise he moved not. Time elapsed. Penrod stooped to flattery, finally to insincere caresses; then, losing patience, spouted sudden threats. Duke remained unmovable, frozen, fast to his great gesture of implacable despair.
A footstep sounded on the threshold of the storeroom.
THE AUTHOR OF “HAROLD RAMOREZ” LIT ONE OF THE HAYSEED CIGARETTES, TURNED TO A BLANK PAGE, AND WROTE, SLOWLY AND EARNESTLY; “CHAPITER THE SIXTH.
“Penrod, come down from that box this instant!”
“Ma'am?”
“Are you up in that sawdust-box again?”
As Mrs.. Schofield had just heard her son's voice issue from the box, and also, as she knew he was there anyhow, her question must have been put for oratorical purposes only. “Because if you are,” she continued promptly, “I'm going to ask your papa not to let you play there any——”
Penrod's forehead, his eyes, the tops of his ears, and most of his hair, became visible to her at the top of the box. “I ain't 'playing,” he said indignantly.
“Well, what are you doing?”
“Just coming down,” he replied, in a grieved but patient tone.
“Then why don't you come?”
“I got Duke here. I got to get him down, haven't I? You don't suppose I want to leave a poor dog in here to starve, do you?”
“Well, hand him down over the side to me. Let me——”
“I'll get him down all right,” said Penrod. “I got him up here, and I guess I can get him down!”
“Well then, do it!”
“I will if you'll let me alone. If you'll go on back to the house I promise to be there inside of two minutes. Honest!”
He put extreme urgency into this, and his mother turned toward the house. “If you're not there in two minutes——”
“I will be!”
After her departure, Penrod expended some finalities of eloquence upon Duke, then disgustedly gathered him up in his arms, dumped him into the basket and, shouting sternly, “All in for the ground-floor—step back there, madam—all ready, Jim,” lowered dog and basket to the floor of the storeroom. Duke sprang out in tumultuous relief, and bestowed frantic affection upon his master as the latter slid down from the box.
Penrod dusted himself sketchily, experiencing a sense of satisfaction, dulled by the overhanging afternoon, perhaps, but perceptible: he had the feeling of one who has been true to a cause. The operation of the elevator was unsinful and, save for the shock to Duke's nervous system, it was harmless; but Penrod could not possibly have brought himself to exhibit it in the presence of his mother or any other grown person in the world. The reasons for secrecy were undefined; at least, Penrod did not define them.
After lunch his mother and his sister Margaret, aged nineteen, dressed him for the sacrifice. They stood him near his mother's bedroom window and did what they would to him.
During the earlier anguishes of the process he was mute, exceeding the pathos of the stricken calf in the shambles; but a student of eyes might have perceived in his soul the premonitory symptoms of a sinister uprising. At a rehearsal (in citizens' clothes) attended by mothers and grown-up sisters, Mrs. Lora Rewbush had announced that she wished the costuming to be “as medieval and artistic as possible.” Otherwise, and as to details, she said, she would leave the costumes entirely to the good taste of the children's parents.
Mrs. Schofield and Margaret were no archeologists, but they knew that their taste was as good as that of the other mothers and sisters concerned; so with perfect confidence they had planned and executed a costume for Penrod; and the only misgiving they felt was connected with the tractability of the Child Sir Lancelot himself.
Stripped to his underwear, he had been made to wash himself vehemently; then they began by shrouding his legs in a pair of silk stockings, once blue but now mostly whitish. Upon Penrod they visibly surpassed mere ampleness; but they were long, and it required only a rather loose imagination to assume that they were tights.
The upper part of his body was next concealed from view by a garment so peculiar that its description becomes difficult. In 1886, Mrs. Schofield, then unmarried, had worn at her “coming-out party” a dress of vivid salmon silk which had been remodeled after her marriage to accord with various epochs of fashion until a final, unskilful campaign at a dye-house had left it in a condition certain to attract much attention to the wearer. Mrs. Schofield had considered giving it to Della, the cook; but had decided against it, because you never could tell how Della was going to take things, and cooks were scarce.
It may have been the word “medieval” (in Mrs. Lora Rewbush's rich phrase) which had inspired the idea for a last and conspicuous usefulness; at all events, the bodice of that once salmon dress, somewhat modified and moderated, now took a position, for its farewell appearance in society, upon the back, breast, and arms of the Child Sir Lancelot.
The area thus costumed ceased at the waist, leaving a Jaeger-like and unmedieval gap thence to the tops of the stockings. The inventive genius of woman triumphantly bridged it, but in a manner which imposes upon history almost insuperable delicacies of description. Penrod's father was an old-fashioned man: the twentieth century had failed to shake his faith in red flannel for cold weather; and it was while Mrs. Schofield was putting away her husband's winter underwear that she perceived how hopelessly one of the elder specimens had dwindled; and simultaneously she received the inspiration which resulted in a pair of trunks {or the Child Sir Lancelot, and added an earnest bit of color, as well as a genuine touch of the Middle Ages, to his costume. Reversed, fore to aft, with the greater part of the legs cut off, and strips of silver braid covering the seams, this garment, she felt, was not traceable to its original source.
When it had been placed upon Penrod, the stockings were attached to it by a system of safety-pins, not very perceptible at a distance. Next, after being severely warned against stooping, Penrod got his feet into the slippers he wore to dancing-school—“patent-leather pumps” now decorated with large pink rosettes.
“If I cant stoop,” he began, smolderingly, “Id like to know how'm I goin' to kneel in the pag——”
“You must manage!” This, uttered through pins, was evidently thought to be sufficient.
They fastened some ruching about his slender neck, pinned ribbons at random all over him, and then Margaret thickly powdered his hair.
“Oh, yes, that's all right,” she said, replying to a question put by her mother. “They always powdered their hair in Colonial times.”
“It doesn't seem right to me—exactly,” objected Mrs. Schoheld, gently. “Sir Lancelot must have been ever so long before Colonial times.”
“That doesn't matter,” Margaret reassured her. “Nobody'll know the difference—Mrs. Lora Rewbush least of all. I don't think she knows a thing about it, though, of course, she does write splendidly and the words of the pageant are just beautiful. Stand still, Penrod!” (The author of “Harold Ramorez” had moved convulsively.) “Besides, powdered hair's always becoming. Look at him. You'd hardly know it was Penrod!”
The pride and admiration with which she pronounced this undeniable truth might have been thought tactless, but Penrod, not analytical, found his spirits somewhat elevated. No mirror was in his range of vision and, though he had submitted to cursory measurements of his person, a week earlier, he had no previous acquaintance with the costume. He began to form a not unpleasing mental picture of his appearance, something somewhere between the portraits of George Washington and a vivid memory of Miss Julia Marlowe at a matinée of “Twelfth Night.”
He was additionally cheered by a sword which had been borrowed from a neighbor, who was a Knight of Pythias. Finally there was a mantle, an old golf cape of Margaret's. Fluffy polka-dots of white cotton had been sewed to it generously; also it was ornamented with a large cross of red flannel, suggested by the picture of a Crusader in a newspaper advertisement. The mantle was fastened to his shoulder (that is, to the shoulders of Mrs. Schofield's ex-bodice) by means of large safety-pins, and arranged to hang down behind him, touching his heels, but obscuring nowise the glory of his façade. Then, at last, he was allowed to step before a mirror.
It was a full-length glass, and the worst immediately happened. It might have been a little less violent, perhaps, if Penrod's expectations had not been so richly and poetically idealized; but as things were, the revolt was volcanic.
Victor Hugo's account of the fight with the devil-fish, in “Toilers of the Sea,” encourages a belief that, had Hugo lived and increased in power, he might have been equal to a proper recital of the half-hour which followed Penrod's first sight of himself as the Child Sir Lancelot. But Mr. Wilson himself, dastard but eloquent foe of Harold Ramorez, could not have expressed, with all the vile dashes at his command, the sentiments which animated Penrod's bosom when the instantaneous and unalterable conviction descended upon him that he was intended by his loved ones to make a public spectacle of himself in his sister's stockings and part of an old dress of his mother's.
To him these familiar things were not disguised at all; there was no possibility that the whole world would not know them at a glance. The stockings were worse than the bodice. He had been assured that these could not be recognized, but, seeing them in the mirror, he was sure that no human eye could fail at first glance to detect the difference between himself and the former purposes of these stockings. Fold, wrinkle, and void shrieked their history with a hundred tongues, invoking earthquake, eclipse, and blue ruin. The frantic youth's final submission was only obtained after a painful telephonic conversation between himself and his father, the latter having been called up and upon, by the exhausted Mrs. Schofield, to subjugate his offspring by wire.
The two ladies made all possible haste, after this, to deliver Penrod into the hands of Mrs. Lora Rewbush; nevertheless they found opportunity to exchange earnest congratulations upon his not having recognized the humble but serviceable paternal garment now brilliant about the Lancelotish middle. Altogether they felt that the costume was a success. Penrod looked like nothing ever remotely imagined by Sir Thomas Malory or Alfred Tennyson; for that matter, he looked like nothing ever before seen on earth; but as Mrs. Schofield and Margaret took their places in the audience at the Women's Arts and Guild Hall, the anxiety they felt concerning Penrod's elocutionary and gesticular powers, so soon to be put to public test, was pleasantly tempered by their satisfaction that, owing to their efforts, his outward appearance would be a credit to the family.
The Child Sir Lancelot found himself in a large anteroom behind the stage—a room crowded with excited children, all about equally medieval and artistic. Penrod was less conspicuous than he thought himself, but he was so preoccupied with his own shame, steeling his nerves to meet the first inevitable taunting reference to his sister's stockings, that he failed to perceive there were others present in much of his own unmanned condition. Retiring to a corner immediately upon his entrance, he managed to unfasten the mantle at the shoulders and, drawing it round him, pinned it again at his throat so that it concealed the rest of his costume. This permitted a temporary relief, but increased his horror of the moment when, in pursuance of the action of the “pageant,” the sheltering garment must be cast aside.
Some of the other child knights were also keeping their mantles close about them. A few of the envied opulent flung their mantles back from their shoulders airily, showing off hired splendors from a professional costumer's stock. One or two were insulting examples of parental indulgence, particularly little Maurice Levy, the Child Sir Galahad. This shrinking person went clamorously about, making it known everywhere that the best tailor in town had been dazzled by a great sum into constructing his costume. It consisted of blue velvet knickerbockers, a white satin waistcoat, and a beautifully cut little swallow-tailed coat with pearl buttons. The medieval and artistic triumph was completed by a mantle of yellow velvet, and little white boots, sporting gold tassels.
All this radiance paused in a brilliant career and addressed the Child Sir Lancelot, gathering an immediately formed semi-circular audience of little girls. Woman was ever the trailer of magnificence.
“What you got on,” inquired Mr. Levy, after dispensing information, “under that ole golf cape?”
Penrod looked upon him coldly. At other times his questioner would have approached him with deference, even with apprehension. But to-day the Child Sir Galahad was somewhat intoxicated with the power of his own beauty.
“What you got on?” he repeated.
“Oh, nothin',” said Penrod, with an indifference assumed at great cost to his nervous system.
The elate Maurice was inspired to be a wit. “Then you're nakid!” he shouted exultantly. “Penrod Schofield says he hasn't got nothin on under that old golf cape! He's nakid, he's nakid!”
The indelicate little girls giggled delightedly, and a javelin pierced the inwards of Penrod when he saw that the Child Elaine, amber-curled and beautiful Marjorie Jones, lifted golden laughter to the ghastly jest. Other boys and girls came flocking to the uproar. “He's nakid, he's nakid!” shrieked the Child Sir Galahad. “Penrod Schofield's nakid! He's na-a-a-kid!”
“Hush, hush!” said Mrs. Lora Rewbush, pushing her way into the group. “Remember, we are all little knights and ladies today. Little knights and ladies of the Table Round would not make so much noise. Now children, we must begin to take our places on the stage. Is everybody here?”
Penrod made his escape under cover of this diversion: he slid behind Mrs. Lora Rewbush and, being near a door, opened it unnoticed and went out quickly, closing it behind him. He found himself in a narrow and vacant hallway which led to a door marked “Janitor's Room.”
Burning with outrage, heart-sick at the sweet, cold-blooded laughter of Marjorie Jones, Penrod rested his elbows upon a window-sill and speculated upon the effects of a leap from the second story. One of the reasons he gave it up was his desire to live on Maurice Levy's account: already he was forming educational plans for the Child Sir Galahad.
A stout man in blue overalls passed through the hallway muttering to himself petulantly. “I reckon they'll find that hall hot enough now!” he said, conveying to Penrod an impression that some too feminine women had sent him upon an unreasonable errand to the furnace. He went into the Janitor's Room and, emerging a moment later, minus the overalls, passed Penrod again with a bass rumble—“Dern em!” it seemed he said—and made a gloomy exit by the door at the upper end of the hallway.
The conglomerate and delicate rustle of a large, well-bred audience was heard as the janitor opened and closed the door; and sudden stage-fright seized the boy. The orchestra began an overture and, at that, Penrod, trembling violently, tiptoed down the hall into the Janitor's Room. It was a cul-de-sac: there was no outlet save by the way he had come.
Despairingly he doffed his mantle and looked down upon himself for a last sickening assurance that the stockings were as obviously and disgracefully Margaret's as they had seemed in the mirror at home. For a moment he was encouraged: perhaps he was no worse than some of the other boys. Then he noticed that a safety-pin had opened; it was one of those connecting the stockings with his trunks. He sat down to fasten it and his eye fell for the first time with particular attention upon the trunks. Until this instant he had been preoccupied with the stockings.
Slowly recognition dawned in his eyes.
The Schofield's house stood on a corner at the intersection of two main-traveled streets; the fence was low, and the publicity obtained by the washable portion of the family apparel, on Mondays, had often been painful to Penrod; for boys have a peculiar sensitiveness in these matters. A plain, matter-of-fact washerwoman, employed by Mrs. Schofield, never left anything to the imagination of the passer-by; and of all her calm display the scarlet flaunting of his father's winter wear had most abashed Penrod. One day Marjorie Jones, all gold and starch, had passed when the dreadful things were on the line: Penrod had hidden himself, shuddering. The whole town, he was convinced, knew these garments intimately and derisively.
And now, as he sat in the janitor's chair, the horrible and paralyzing recognition came. He had not an instants doubt that every fellow actor, as well as every soul in the audience, would recognize what his mother and sister had put upon him. For as the awful truth became plain to himself it seemed blazoned to the world; and far, far louder than the stockings, the trunks did fairly bellow the grisly secret: whose they were and what they were!
Most people have suffered in a dream the experience of finding themselves very inadequately clad in the midst of a crowd of well-dressed people; and such dreamer's sensations are comparable to Penrod's, though faintly, because Penrod was awake and in much too full possession of the most active capacities for anguish.
A human male whose dress has been damaged, or reveals some vital lack, suffers from a hideous and shameful loneliness which makes every second absolutely unbearable until he is again as others of his sex and species; and there is no act or sin whatever too desperate for him in his struggle to attain that condition. Also there is absolutely no embarrassment possible to a woman which is comparable to that of a man under corresponding circumstances; and in this a boy is a man. Gazing upon the ghastly trunks, the stricken Penrod felt that he was a degree worse than nude; and a great horror of himself filled his soul.
“Penrod Schofield!”
The door into the hallway opened, and a voice demanded him. He could not be seen from the hallway, but the hue and the cry was up; and he knew he must be taken. It was only a question of seconds. He huddled in his chair.
“Penrod Schofield!” cried Mrs. Lora Rewbush angrily.
The distracted boy rose and, as he did so, a long pin sank deep into his waist. He extracted it frenziedly, which brought to his ears a protracted and sonorous ripping, too easily located by a final gesture of horror.
“Penrod Schofield!” Mrs. Lora Rewbush had come out into the hallway.
And now, in this extremity, when all seemed lost indeed, particularly including honor, the dilating eye of the outlaw fell upon the blue overalls which the janitor had left hanging upon a peg. Inspiration and action were almost simultaneous...
“Penrod!” Mrs. Lora Rewbush stood in the doorway, indignantly gazing upon a Child Sir Lancelot mantled to the heels. “Do you know that you have kept an audience of five hundred people waiting for ten minutes?” She also detained the five hundred while she spake further.
“Well,” said Penrod contentedly, as he followed her toward the buzzing stage, “I was just sitting there thinking.”
Two minutes later the curtain rose on a medieval castle hall richly done in the new stage-craft made in Germany, and consisting of pink and blue cheese-cloth. The Child King Arthur and the Child Queen Guinevere were disclosed upon thrones, with the Child Elaine and many other celebrities in attendance; while about fifteen Child Knights were seated at a dining-room table round, which was covered with a large Oriental rug, and displayed (for the knights refreshment) a banquet service of silver loving-cups and trophies, borrowed from the Country Club and some local automobile manufacturers.
In addition to this splendor, potted plants and palms have seldom been more lavishly used in any castle on the stage or off. The footlights were aided by a “spot-light” from the rear of the hall; and the children were revealed in a blaze of glory.
A hushed, multitudinous “O-oh” of admiration came from the decorous and delighted audience. Then the children sang feebly:
“Children of the Tabul Round,
Lit-tul knights and ladies we.
Let our voy-siz all resound
Faith and hope and charitee!”
The Child King Arthur rose, extended his scepter with the decisive gesture of a semaphore, and spake:
“Each little knight and lady bom
Has noble deeds to perform
In thee child-world of shivullree,
No matter how small his share may be.
Let each advance and tell in turn
What claim has each to knighthood earn.”
The Child Sir Mordred, the villain of this piece, rose in his place at the table round, and piped the only lines ever written by Mrs. Lora Rewbush which Penrod Schofield could have pronounced without loathing. George Bassett, a really angelic boy, had been selected for the rôle of Mordred. His perfect conduct had earned for him the sardonic sobriquet, “The Little Gentleman,” among his boy acquaintances. (Naturally he had no friends.) The other boys supposed that he had been selected for the wicked Mordred as a reward of virtue. He declaimed serenely:
“I hight Sir Mordred the Child, and I teach
Lessons of selfishest evil, and reach
Out into darkness.. Thoughtless, unkind,
And ruthless is Mordred, and unrefined.”
The Child Mordred was properly rebuked and denied the accolade, though, like the others, he seemed to have assumed the title already. He made a plotter's exit. Whereupon Maurice Levy rose, bowed, announced that he highted the Child Sir Galahad, and continued with perfect sang-froid:
“I am the purest of the pure.
I have but kindest thoughts each day.
I give my riches to the poor,
And follow in the Master's way.”
This elicited tokens of approval from the Child King Arthur, and he bade Maurice “stand forth” and come near the throne, a command obeyed with the easy grace of conscious merit.
HE FINISHED HIS SPEECH UNHEARD. THE AUDIENCE HAD RECOVERED BREATH, BUT HAD LOST SELF-CONTROL, AND THERE ENSUED A SORT OF CULTURED RIOT.
It was Penrod's turn. He stepped back from his chair, the table between him and the audience, and began in a high, breathless monotone:
“I hight Sir Lancelot du Lake, the Child,
Gentul-hearted, meek, and mild.
What though I'm a but a littul child,
Gentul-heartud, meek, and mild
I do my share though but—though but—”
Penrod paused and gulped. The voice of Mrs. Lora Rewbush was heard from the wings, prompting irritably, and the Child Sir Lancelot repeated:
“I do my share though but—though but a tot. I pray you knight Sir Lancelot!”
This also met the royal favor, and Penrod was bidden to join Sir Galahad at the throne. As he crossed the stage, Mrs. Schofield whispered to Margaret:
“That boy! He's unpinned his mantle and fixed it to cover his whole costume. After we worked so hard to make it becoming!”
“Never mind; he'll have to take the cape off in a minute,” returned Margaret. She leaned forward suddenly, narrowing her eyes to see better. “What is that thing hanging about his left ankle?” she whispered uneasily. “How queer! He must have got tangled in something.”
“Where?” asked Mrs. Schofield, in alarm.
“His left foot. It makes him stumble. Don't you see? It looks—it looks like an elephants foot!”
The Child Sir Lancelot and the Child Sir Galahad clasped hands before their Child King. Penrod was conscious of a great uplift: in a moment he would have to throw aside his mantle, but even so he was protected and sheltered in the human garment of a man. His stage-fright had passed, for the audience was but an indistinguishable blur of darkness beyond the dazzling lights. His most repulsive speech (that in which he proclaimed himself a “tot”) was over and done with; and now at last the small, moist hand of the Child Sir Galahad lay within his own. Craftily his brown fingers stole from Maurice's palm to the wrist. The two boys declaimed in concert:
“We are two childrun of the Tabul Round
Strewing kindness all a-round.
With love and good deeds striving ever for the best.
May our littul efforts e'er be blest.
Two littul hearts we offer. See
United in love, faith, hope, and char—Ow!”
The conclusion of the duet was marred. The Child Sir Galahad suddenly stiffened, and, uttering an irrepressible shriek of anguish, gave a brief exhibition of the contortionist's art. (“He's twistin my wrist! Dern you, leggo!”)
The voice of Mrs. Lora Rewbush was again heard from the wings; it sounded bloodthirsty. Penrod released his victim; and the Child King Arthur, somewhat disconcerted, extended his scepter and, with the assistance of the enraged prompter, said:
“Sweet child-friends of the Tabul Round,
In brotherly love and kindness abound.
Sir Lancelot, you have spoken well,
Sir Galahad, too, as clear as bell.
So now pray doff your mantles gay.
You shall be knighted this very day.”
And Penrod doffed his mantle.
Simultaneously, a thick and vasty gasp came from the audience, as from five hundred bathers in a wholly unexpected surf. This gasp was punctuated irregularly, over the auditorium, by imperfectly subdued screams both of dismay and incredulous joy, and by two dismal shrieks. Altogether it was an extraordinary sound, a sound never to be forgotten by any one who heard it. It was almost as unforgettable as the sight which caused it; the word “sight” being here used in its vernacular sense, for Penrod, standing unmantled and revealed in all the medieval and artistic glory of the janitor's blue overalls, falls within its meaning.
The janitor was a heavy man, and his overalls, upon Penrod, were merely oceanic. The boy was at once swaddled and lost within their blue gulfs and vast saggings; and the left leg, too hastily rolled up, had descended with a distinctively elephantine effect, as Margaret had observed. Certainly, the Child Sir Lancelot was at least a sight.
It is probable that a great many in that hall must have had, even then, a consciousness that they were looking on at History in the Making. A supreme act is recognizable at sight: it bears the birthmark of immortality. But Penrod, that marvelous boy, had begun to declaim, even with the gesture of flinging off his mantle for the accolade:
“I first, the Child Sir Lancelot du Lake,
Will volunteer to knighthood take.
And kneeling here before your throne
I vow to——”
He finished his speech unheard. The audience had recovered breath, but had lost self-control, and there ensued something later described by a participant as a sort of cultured riot.
The actors in the Pageant were not so dumfounded by Penrod's costume as might have been expected. A few precocious geniuses perceived that the overalls were the Child Lancelot's own comment on maternal intentions; and these were profoundly impressed: they regarded him with the grisly admiration of young and aspiring criminals for a jail-mate about to be distinguished by hanging. But most of the children simply took it to be the case (a little strange, but not startling) that Penrod's mother had dressed him like that—which is pathetic. They tried to go on with the Pageant.
They made a brief, manful effort. But the irrepressible outbursts from the audience confused them; every time Sir Lancelot du Lake the Child opened his mouth, the great, shadowy house fell into an uproar and the children into confusion. Strong women and brave girls in the audience went out into the lobby, shrieking and clinging to one another. Others remained, rocking in their seats, helpless and spent. The neighborhood of Mrs. Schofield and Margaret became, tactfully, a desert. Friends of the author went behind the scenes and encountered a hitherto unknown phase of Mrs. Lora Rewbush; they said, afterward, that she hardly seemed to know what she was doing. She begged to be left alone somewhere with Penrod Schofield, for just a little while; but they led her away.
The sun was setting behind the back fence (though at a considerable distance) as Penrod Schofield approached that fence, and looked thoughtfully up at the top of it, apparently having it in mind to climb up and sit there. Debating this, he passed his fingers gently up and down the backs of his legs; and then something seemed to decide him not to sit anywhere. He leaned against the fence, sighed profoundly, and gazed at Duke, his wistful dog.
The sigh was reminiscent: episodes of simple pathos were passing before his inward eye. About the most painful was the vision of lovely Marjorie Jones, weeping with rage as the Child Sir Lancelot was dragged, insatiate, from the prostrate and howling Child Sir Galahad, after an onslaught delivered the precise instant the curtain began to fall upon the demoralized Pageant. And then—oh, pangs! oh, woman!—she slapped at the ruffian's cheek, as he was led past her by a resentful janitor; and turning, flung her arms round the Child Sir Galahad's neck. Maurice's little white boots and gold tassels had done their work.
At home the late Child Sir Lancelot was consigned to a locked clothes-closet pending the arrival of his father. Mr. Schofield came and, shortly after, there was put into practise an old patriarchal custom. It is a custom of inconceivable antiquity: probably primordial, certainly prehistoric, but still in vogue in some remaining citadels of the ancient simplicities of the Republic.
And now, therefore, in the dusk, Penrod leaned against the fence and sighed.
His case is comparable to that of an adult who could have survived a similar experience. Looking back to the sawdust-box, fancy pictures this comparable adult a serious and inventive writer, engaged in congenial literary activities in a private retreat. We see this period marked by the creation of some of the most virile passages of a Work dealing exclusively in red corpuscles and huge primal impulses. We see this thoughtful man dragged from his calm seclusion to a horrifying publicity; forced to adopt the stage and, himself a writer, compelled to exploit the repulsive sentiments of an author not only personally distasteful to him but whose whole method and school in belles lettres he despises.
We see him reduced by desperation and modesty to stealing a pair of overalls. We conceive him to have ruined then his own reputation, and to have utterly disgraced his family; next, to have engaged in the duello and to have been spurned by his lady-love, thus lost to him forever. Finally, we must behold: imprisonment by the authorities; the third degree—and flagellation.
We conceive our man deciding that his career had been perhaps too eventful. Yet Penrod had condensed all of it into eight hours.
It appears that he had at least some shadowy perception of a recent fulness of life, for, as he leaned against the fence, gazing uixn his wistful Duke, he sighed again and murmured aloud:
“Well, hasn't this been a day!”
But in a little while a star came out, freshly lighted, from the highest part of the sky, and Penrod, looking up, noticed it casually and a little drowsily. He yawned. Then he sighed once more, but not reminiscently: evening had come; the day was over.
It was a sigh of pure ennui.
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.
Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse