after you’d done that at Grandmother Booth’s, there wasn’t anything else to do except to go out and watch the ants on the front walk. However, for the higher type of recreation, there was a library; and in the evenings my grandmother talked interestingly upon the four subjects that absorbed her: Carlyle, Emerson, Robert G. Ingersoll, and the French Revolution. Grandfather Booth, eighty-seven and almost always deep in gentle reverie, seldom spoke.
I was supposed to be leading a very quiet life and not to think about school; I led the quiet life all right, and didn’t think about school. After several weeks my grandmother decided that I needed to be brightened up; she invited the daughter of an old friend of hers to come and spend a day at play with me.
Little Isabel was a fat, friendly little girl, briskly talkative, and I didn’t dislike her. On the other hand, I didn’t like her either. We were given a room upstairs to sit down and play in, but Isabel didn’t know any games for two and neither did I. Isabel, polite, chatted and chatted, while a longing came over me to go away from her; but I was sure that wherever I went she’d feel it her duty as my guest to go with me. Older people find such problems complicated, requiring delicate handling, but a boy of ten can’t be trusted not to solve them with a primordial and atrocious simplicity. I went to an open window, pointed out of it, and said eagerly, “Look, Isabel!”
Isabel came to the window and asked, “Where?”
I pointed to the grass below. “Right down there!”
Isabel leaned out of the window. I retired into the hall, locked the one door of the room that contained good little Isabel, who still looked out of the window. Then I put the key in my pocket, descended the stairs, and strolled out to the street. There, experiencing a sense of relief and freedom, I decided upon a real excursion. I went all the way to the Wabash River at the edge of town, threw pebbles into the water, and enjoyed the landscape. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
Finally, though, I thought of Isabel again. Maybe she was getting tired of that room by this time and she might be hungry too. It struck me that she ought to be let out. It was a long walk back and I was tired, myself, when I reached grandmother’s house, but I found the place more excited than restful.
Whining Schoolboy
Good little Isabel’s manners were so excellent that she hadn’t made a really important uproar until more than an hour of her seclusion had passed. When I arrived, her mother had been sent for, and she and my grandmother and my grandfather and my Uncle Lucius were trying to comfort Isabel through the door, upon which a noisy and inefficient locksmith was working baffledly. Isabel’s mother was very kind: she just said I seemed to be a strange sort of boy, and took the precaution of leading Isabel home at once. Grandmother Booth was kind, too, but often looked at me speculatively after that. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking, but her expression made it plain that she was thinking.
I came home to Indianapolis still bullfrogging in my throat, exercising my nose, and doing talented things with my scalp and my ears; so I was kept on vacation. In the autumn, being now eleven, I went back to school; but I’d of course dropped behind. My former class was a full year ahead of me and I found myself to be again without any interest whatever in education. I had another teacher, a pleasant one; but felt no ambition to shine before her or before anybody. School had become drudgery and confinement; I held a low opinion of it and of myself. Then, one day of that September, I had a flash of aggrandizement and once more, as in my infancy, was able to look upon Master Newton Booth Tarkington as a great person.
The revelation of beauties within me took place at the Indiana State Fair. One of the younger Chapman boys and I had saved up for the fair, and were permitted by our mothers to set forth early in the morning to spend the whole day together among agricultural machines, prize hogs, poultry, cattle, vegetables, fruit, side shows, balloon ascensions, dangerous edibles, trotting races, and dusty crowds. Page and I felt opulent, for, in addition to the lunch our mothers had provided for us, I think we each possessed about sixty-five cents, pure spending money.
Encounter with Life
We spent it more hurriedly than we intended. By noon we’d seen everything, contained candy, peanuts, popcorn, gingerbread, cider, lemonade, were broke, and ate our lunches languidly. After that we listened to barkers, saw two balloons rise from crowds we couldn’t penetrate; and then for a long time believed we were watching the races because we were looking at the backs of people over whose shoulders we caught infrequent glimpses of horses’ ears and drivers’ gaudy caps flitting by.
When we’d conscientiously stayed through the last race, Page and I were separated in the departing throngs, and didn’t find each other again. The afternoon was waning, dim autumnal sunset came on; but I wandered through the thinning crowd, scuffing the littered ground, dog-tired, yet not content to be upon my homeward way. There must be something more to see, I thought, something that Page and I had overlooked; and after a while, in a remote part of the fairgrounds, I found it.
It was a strange vehicle, four-wheeled but smallish. Upon the underpinning there was a sort of little house with glass windows, and the windows had neat little lace curtains. Between the curtains was seen a bed—a bed with a clean white coverlet, white bolster, and pillows—and the bed and the lace curtains were all that the little house contained. Moreover, the contraption was not intended to be drawn by a horse. A peculiar man, the owner of the little house, stood between the narrow shafts and, with straps over his shoulders and across his chest, was showing a small crowd of loiterers how he traveled, pulling the vehicle, his home, with him from fair to fair and town to town, he said.
He was a wild-looking man, I thought. His black clothes were tattery; the brim of his old black slouch hat blew back from his unkempt long black hair; he had a ragged black beard; and the whites of his eyes could be seen from an unusual distance. He spoke with an appealing earnestness; though I couldn’t hear what he said, because, after I’d looked into his house between the little curtains, something about the owner and his manner embarrassed me, not for myself but for him; and I withdrew to a slight knoll perhaps a hundred feet away. I stood and watched, fascinated yet unwilling to be closer.
The man stepped out of his harness, stood forth, and I comprehended that he was lecturing, so to call it, to the people about him. With great rapidity and that serious eagerness he seemed to be talking about himself, his travels, and his odd little house. I got the impression that he wasn’t quite right in his head, and I saw that his closer listeners thought this, too, and it amused them. They were increased in number until there were perhaps fifty or sixty of them, men and boys, all laughing; and the more earnest he became, the more they laughed.
He addressed them with a greater and greater vehemence; his gestures became fantastic, and the crowd about him shouted with mirth. He wasn’t angry with them; what he said, so far as I could know, was in the nature of passionate appeal, as if he begged for justice. Then he passed his hat among the crowd, while the laughter grew, and, when he examined what had been put into the hat, I saw that he was in great pain and disappointment; for he turned the hat upside down and sadly emptied it of its contents—peanut shells, tobacco quids, and apple cores. The jokers howled, and he began all over again, trying to prove that he and his house were worth his tormentors’ patronage and support.
They constantly interrupted him with cheering. The more he urged his case upon them, the louder they mocked him. Young louts among them flicked pebbles at him, tossed gobs of earth upon him, and, when he paused to wipe the dirt from his face, were in ecstasy. They knocked off his hat, and, when he patiently returned it to his head, daring ones rushed in, shoved him about, and manhandled him. He went on with his speech.
Standing on my knoll in the growing dusk, I watched and thought that my heart must break for that poor man. If I hadn’t spent all my money I would have given it to him; I would have given him everything I had. I couldn’t lift my voice
