fallen down and hurt himself?”
“Did he?” I said. “Well—I think I remember he was limping or something.”
“The most dreadful part of it,” my mother went on, “was that he didn’t tell anybody, and it was almost midnight when his mother and father thought they heard him groaning in his sleep, and went to see and found that he was in a high fever and delirious.
The doctor’s afraid Chase has blood poisoning, and he’s very, very sick. Isn’t it dreadful?”
The Male Animal
I said yes, it was; but felt that it had been dreadful only while I feared she knew I’d been present when Chase shot himself. She seemed gratifyingly innocent not to suspect me; I didn’t perceive the inability of a grown person even to imagine that any boy at the picnic—much less all of us—had known the truth about Chase and not instantly sped for adult help to save him. My sensations were of sweet relief; and in this, again, I was not uniquely monstrous. With other boys of the picnic party I joined, that afternoon, in lighthearted sports. Chase had correctly given all adults the impression that he’d been alone when he hurt his knee; and now he was pretty sick, but nobody else was in any trouble at all.
We weren’t even grateful to Chase for not incriminating us; we simply dismissed the affair from our minds, and, when Chase palely appeared among us again, some weeks later, neither he nor we more than briefly referred to it. In our whole procedure there appears to be a suggestion that the germs of unwritten and unspoken gangster law reside in the very nature of even the well-brought-up boy. If, however, the episode might seem to show forth human young male animals as lacking all capacity for sympathy, the deduction would be faulty.
With alarmed egoism not in the ascendant, any one of that group of boys could be—though perhaps secretly—as tender as a mother. My own sympathies sometimes kept me busy for hours at a time. I injuriously did my loving best with glue to repair a butterfly with a broken wing; I earnestly dosed and tended sick cats, and adopted, fed, and cherished a blind lost dog. Four newborn she-pups condemned by a neighbor to drown I begged of him and tried faithfully, in spite of jeering criticism, to raise on the bottle. I surreptitiously took large old gray rats from our cook’s trap in the cellar, kept them in a straw-filled box in the stable until they made their escape; then I worried about what would happen to them without my care and the regular three meals a day I’d been giving them. My usually impractical sympathies seem to have extended themselves so unduly, indeed, that I fear I may have been, after all, a sentimental boy.
By the end of July that summer, I was twelve and busy with the imitation of a classic—or at least ancient—dramatic work. I turned to it perhaps because I was a helpless duffer in both the minor and the major sports. I did no better with “mumble-peg” or jackstones or jackstraws than with baseball or marbles or kite flying; but I found that I could, however ineptly, carve and color wood into grotesque faces. Over the country, dime museums were beginning to be the precursors of ten-twenty-and-thirty theatrical entertainments; and at the new Indianapolis Dime Museum I’d been enraptured by a Punch-and-Judy show. I made one, myself, and had a neighborhood success with it; admission, ten pins.
Without difficulty I produced the peculiar vocalizings required by the antique drama; I improvised dialogue, embroidered the story, and provided my wooden-beaded actors with squeaked bits of song and recitative of my own composing. Something of the real showman being within me, I gave as many as three performances in a single afternoon to much the same audience, with mercenary intermissions while its members went home for more pins. To me, the accumulated pins, hoarded in a pasteboard box, mystically represented wealth, and it wasn’t until I went upon a vacation visit that my Punch-and-Judy show was offered to the public for genuine money.
Where I went was to a little town that was a boy’s sheer heaven. “Loveliest village of the plain,” it lay in Illinois just beyond the Indiana border, an emeraldine jewel of a midland county seat in the earliest 80’s: old brick courthouse in the shady green square; stamping and switching farmers’ teams hitched all day to the courthouse fence; monosyllabic loafers draped elsewhere upon this fence, whittling a little between reveries; stores sleeping in the sun all round the square; and Main Street stirless dust, except when a dust whirlwind flipped up from it to dance a moment in the sunshine. All the boys in Marshall went barefoot throughout the summer; meadows, woods, creeks, and old covered bridges were within a hop, skip, and jump from anywhere; nobody hurried and everybody seemed to know everybody else amusedly and without severity.
Marshall meant unhampered life and open country to me, a city boy; but also I had there, in my Uncle Lyman’s commodious house, the companionship of two boys, my first cousins, the younger of whom, Fenton, was almost precisely my own age. Fenton Booth was a jolly boy given to laughter, mock speechmaking, and an unendurable kind of singing that sometimes upset me into such fits of fury as to delight his soul. On an earlier visit to Marshall, he’d provided me with the one moment in my life when I was in a condition to attempt the murder of a fellow being, and did attempt it.
For hours indoors I’d been modeling a head out of a great wad of putty and paying no attention to Fenton’s many shouted appeals to stop my senseless dabbing and come out and play. Finally he skipped in and, as I happened to turn my back, rushed upon the almost completed work of art that had so long absorbed me, and obliterated it instantaneously; only shapelessness remained. I flew at him, but he sped away, singing tauntingly:
“Oh, remember while you’re young
That the days to you will come
When you’re old and only in the way!”
He was still singing when he reached the sunshiny village street and I found a brickbat in the dust. Cackling loudly his taunting song, he turned his head to laugh at me over his shoulder and wasn’t ten feet from me when with all my force I threw the brickbat straight at his merry face. He hadn’t thought me murderous, didn’t believe I’d throw, but ducked a little anyhow, and one jagged edge of the brickbat passed swiftly through his hair. If he hadn’t moved his head at all it’s probable that an exalted judicatory body, the United States Court of Claims, in Washington, would subsequently have operated for many years under a less distinguished Chief Justice. The space of half an inch saved the life of a future personage, and proved to me that an artist, even when interrupted in his full passion of creation, shouldn’t be too natural.
Fenton and I both looked at the brickbat where it lay guiltily in the dust, and before long he was able to sing again; but I stayed frightened about myself. I didn’t go back to my wad of putty.
Two years later, when we were twelve and I came on this midsummer visit to Marshall, Fenton had become a journalist. His father had given him a printing press and the use of a small vacant warehouse. There, with village-boy subordinates, he had established a newspaper, The Early Bird, two cents a copy; and in Indianapolis I had received and admired a sample of every previous week’s issue. Fenton wouldn’t allow me to unpack my trunk, he was so eager to show me The Early Bird newspaper office, and himself and his subeditors, who were also printers, in action. When we got there, though, I was somewhat dashed.
Across the middle of the floor, from one end wall to the other, ran an old wooden balustrade, apparently to exclude the public—and the public, I learned at once, consisted of me. On the other side of the balustrade, Fenton and his assistants immediately busied themselves with the printing press, with their desks, pencils, and paper, shouting crisp orders at one another, setting up an elaborate professional bustle, and leaving me to contemplate a pasteboard sign, keep out, hung over my side of the balustrade! Without knowing it, I was filling the function of audience, and the efforts I made to become something better weren’t encouraged. When finally, leaning plaintively over the railing, I asked if I couldn’t even be elected or appointed one of the newsboys to deliver the paper to subscribers, nobody seemed
