VII.
MANNERS AND CUSTOMS.
I SOMETIMES wonder how much these have changed since my boy's time. Ofcourse they differ somewhat from generation to generation, and from Eastto West and North to South, but not so much, I believe, as grown peopleare apt to think. Everywhere and always the world of boys is outside ofthe laws that govern grown-up communities, and it has its unwrittenusages, which are handed down from old to young, and perpetuated on thesame level of years, and are lived into and lived out of, but arebinding, through all personal vicissitudes, upon the great body of boysbetween six and twelve years old. No boy can violate them without losinghis standing among the other boys, and he cannot enter into their worldwithout coming under them. He must do this, and must not do that; heobeys, but he does not know why, any more than the far-off savages fromwhom his customs seem mostly to have come. His world is all in andthrough the world of men and women, but no man or woman can get into itany more than if it were a world of invisible beings. It has its ownideals and superstitions, and these are often of a ferocity, adepravity, scarcely credible in after-life. It is a great pity thatfathers and mothers cannot penetrate that world; but they cannot, and itis only by accident that they can catch some glimpse of what goes on init. No doubt it will be civilized in time, but it will be very slowly;and in the meanwhile it is only in some of its milder manners andcustoms that the boy's world can be studied.
The first great law was that, whatever happened to you through anotherboy, whatever hurt or harm he did you, you were to right yourself uponhis person if you could; but if he was too big, and you could not hopeto revenge yourself, then you were to bear the wrong, not only for thattime, but for as many times as he chose to inflict it. To tell theteacher or your mother, or to betray your tormentor to any one outsideof the boys' world, was to prove yourself a cry-baby, without honor orself-respect, and unfit to go with the other fellows. They would havethe right to mock you, to point at you, and call "E-e-e, e-e-e, e-e-e!"at you, till you fought them. After that, whether you whipped them ornot there began to be some feeling in your favor again, and they had tostop.
Every boy who came to town from somewhere else, or who moved into a newneighborhood, had to fight the old residents. There was no reason forthis, except that he was a stranger, and there appeared to be no othermeans of making his acquaintance. If he was generally whipped he becamesubject to the local tribe, as the Delawares were to the Iroquois in thelast century; if he whipped the other boys, then they adopted him intotheir tribe, and he became a leader among them. When you moved away froma neighborhood you did not lose all your rights in it; you did not haveto fight when you went back to see the boys, or anything; but if one ofthem met you in your new precincts you might have to try conclusionswith him; and perhaps, if he was a boy who had been in the habit ofwhipping you, you were quite ready to do so. When my boy's family leftthe Smith house, one of the boys from that neighborhood came up to seehim at the Falconer house, and tried to carry things with a high hand,as he had always done. Then my boy fought him, quite as if he were not aDelaware and the other boy not an Iroquois, with sovereign rights overhim. My boy was beaten, but the difference was that, if he had not beenon new ground, he would have been beaten without daring to fight. Hismother witnessed the combat, and came out and shamed him for hisbehavior, and had in the other boy, and made them friends over somesugar-cakes. But after that the boys of the Smith neighborhoodunderstood that my boy would not be whipped without fighting. The homeinstruction was all against fighting; my boy was taught that it was notonly wicked, but foolish; that if it was wrong to strike, it was just aswrong to strike back; that two wrongs never made a right, and so on. Butall this was not of the least effect with a hot temper amid the trialsand perplexities of life in the Boy's Town.
There were some boys of such standing as bullies and such wide fame thatthey could range all neighborhoods of the town not only without fear ofbeing molested, or made to pass under the local yoke anywhere, but withsuch plenary powers of intimidation that the other boys submitted tothem without question. My boy had always heard of one of these bullies,whose very name, Buz Simpson, carried terror with it; but he had neverseen him, because he lived in the unknown region bordering on the riversouth of the Thomas house. One day he suddenly appeared, when my boy wasplaying marbles with some other fellows in front of the Falconer house,attended by two or three other boys from below the Sycamore Grove. Hewas small and insignificant, but such was the fear his name inspiredthat my boy and his friends cowered before him, though some of them wereno mean fighters themselves. They seemed to know by instinct that thiswas Buz Simpson, and they stood patiently by while he kicked theirmarbles out of the ring and broke up their game, and, after stayingawhile to cover them with ignominy and insult, passed on with hisretainers to other fields of conquest. If it had been death to resisthim, they could not have dreamed less of doing so; and though thisoutrage took place under my boy's own windows, and a single word wouldhave brought efficient aid (for the mere sight of any boy's mother couldput to flight a whole army of other boys), he never dreamed of callingfor help.
That would have been a weakness which would not only have marked himforever as a cry-baby, but an indecorum too gross for words. It wouldhave been as if, when once the boys were playing trip at school, and abig boy tripped him, and he lay quivering and panting on the ground, hehad got up as soon as he could catch his breath and gone in and told theteacher; or as if, when the fellows were playing soak-about, and he gothit in the pit of the stomach with a hard ball, he had complained of thefellow who threw it. There were some things so base that a boy could notdo them; and what happened out of doors, and strictly within the boy'sworld, had to be kept sacredly secret among the boys. For instance, ifyou had been beguiled, as a little boy, into being the last in the gameof snap-the-whip, and the snap sent you rolling head over heels on thehard ground, and skinned your nose and tore your trousers, you could cryfrom the pain without disgrace, and some of the fellows would come upand try to comfort you; but you were bound in honor not to appeal to theteacher, and you were expected to use every device to get the blood offyou before you went in, and to hide the tear in your trousers. Ofcourse, the tear and the blood could not be kept from the anxious eyesat home, but even there you were expected not to say just what boys didit.
They were by no means the worst boys who did such things, but only themost thoughtless. Still, there was a public opinion in the Boy's Townwhich ruled out certain tricks, and gave the boys who played them thename of being "mean." One of these was boring a hole in the edge of yourschool-desk to meet a shaft sunk from the top, which you filled withslate-pencil dust. Then, if you were that kind of boy, you got somelittle chap to put his eye close to the shaft, with the hope of seeingNiagara Falls, and set your lips to the hole in the edge, and blew hiseye full of pencil-dust. This was mean; and it was also mean to get someunsuspecting child to close the end of an elderwood tube with his thumb,and look hard at you, while you showed him Germany. You did this bypulling a string below the tube, and running a needle into his thumb. Myboy discovered Germany in this way long before he had any geographicalor political conception of it.
I do not know why, if these abominable cruelties were thought mean, itwas held lawful to cover a stone with dust and get a boy, not in thesecret, to kick the pile over with his bare foot. It was perfectly goodform, also, to get a boy, if you could, to shut his eyes, and then leadhim into a mud-puddle or a thicket of briers or nettles, or to fool himin any heartless way, such as promising to pump easy when he put hismouth to the pump-spout, and then coming down on the pump-handle with arush that flooded him with water and sent him off blowing the tide fromhis nostrils like a whale. Perhaps these things were permitted becausethe sight of the victim's suffering was so funny. Half the pleasure infighting wasps or bumble-bees was in killing them and destroying theirnests; the other half was in seeing the fellows get stung. If you couldfool a fellow into a mass-meeting of bumble-bees, and see him lead themoff in a stee
ple-chase, it was right and fair to do so. But there wereother cases in which deceit was not allowable. For instance, if youappeared on the playground with an apple, and all the boys came whoopinground, "You know _me_, Jimmy!" "You know your uncle!" "You know yourgrandfather!" and you began to sell out bites at three pins for alady-bite and six pins for a hog-bite, and a boy bought a lady-bite andthen took a hog-bite, he was held in contempt, and could by no meanspass it off for a good joke on you; it was considered mean.
In the Boy's Town there was almost as much stone-throwing as there wasin Florence in the good old times. There was a great abundance of thefinest kind of pebbles, from the size of a robin's egg upward, smoothand shapely, which the boys called rocks. They were always stoningsomething, birds, or dogs, or mere inanimate marks, but most of the timethey were stoning one another. They came out of their houses, orfront-yards, and began to throw stones, when they were on perfectly goodterms, and they usually threw stones in parting for the day. Theystoned a boy who left a group singly, and it was lawful for him to throwstones back at the rest, if the whim took him, when he got a little wayoff. With all this stone-throwing, very little harm was done, though nowand then a stone took a boy on the skull, and raised a lump of its ownsize. Then the other boys knew, by the roar of rage and pain he set up,that he had been hit, and ran home and left him to his fate.
Their fights were mostly informal scuffles, on and off in a flash, andconducted with none of the ceremony which I have read of concerning thefights of English boys. It was believed that some of the fellows knewhow to box, and all the fellows intended to learn, but nobody ever did.The fights sprang usually out of some trouble of the moment; but attimes they were arranged to settle some question of moral or physicalsuperiority. Then one boy put a chip on his shoulder and dared the otherto knock it off. It took a great while to bring the champions to blows,and I have known the mere preparatory insults of a fight of this kind towear out the spirit of the combatants and the patience of thespectators, so that not a blow was struck, finally, and the whole affairfell through.
Though they were so quarrelsome among themselves, the boys that my boywent with never molested girls. They mostly ignored them; but they wouldhave scorned to hurt a girl almost as much as they would have scorned toplay with one. Of course while they were very little they played withgirls; and after they began to be big boys, eleven or twelve years old,they began to pay girls some attention; but for the rest they simplyleft them out of the question, except at parties, when the gamesobliged them to take some notice of the girls. Even then, however, itwas not good form for a boy to be greatly interested in them; and he hadto conceal any little fancy he had about this girl or that unless hewanted to be considered soft by the other fellows. When they were havingfun they did not want to have any girls around; but in the back-yard aboy might play teeter or seesaw, or some such thing, with his sistersand their friends, without necessarily losing caste, though such thingswere not encouraged. On the other hand, a boy was bound to defend themagainst anything that he thought slighting or insulting; and you did nothave to verify the fact that anything had been said or done; you merelyhad to hear that it had. It once fell to my boy to avenge such areported wrong from a boy who had not many friends in school, a timidcreature whom the mere accusation frightened half out of his wits, andwho wildly protested his innocence. He ran, and my boy followed with theother boys after him, till they overtook the culprit and brought him tobay against a high board fence; and there my boy struck him in hisimploring face. He tried to feel like a righteous champion, but he feltlike a brutal ruffian. He long had the sight of that terrified, weepingface, and with shame and sickness of heart he cowered before it. It waspretty nearly the last of his fighting; and though he came off victor,he felt that he would rather be beaten himself than do another such actof justice. In fact, it seems best to be very careful how we try to dojustice in this world, and mostly to leave retribution of all kinds toGod, who really knows about things; and content ourselves as much aspossible with mercy, whose mistakes are not so irreparable.
The boys had very little to do with the inside of one another's houses.They would follow a boy to his door, and wait for him to come out; andthey would sometimes get him to go in and ask his mother for crullers orsugar-cakes; when they came to see him they never went indoors for him,but stood on the sidewalk and called him with a peculiar cry, somethinglike "E-oo-we, e-oo-we!" and threw stones at trees, or anything, till hecame out. If he did not come, after a reasonable time, they knew he wasnot there, or that his mother would not let him come. A fellow was keptin that way, now and then. If a fellow's mother came to the door theboys always ran.
The mother represented the family sovereignty; the father was seldomseen, and he counted for little or nothing among the outside boys. Itwas the mother who could say whether a boy might go fishing or inswimming, and she was held a good mother or not according as shehabitually said yes or no. There was no other standard of goodness formothers in the boy's world, and could be none; and a bad mother might beoutwitted by any device that the other boys could suggest to her boy.Such a boy was always willing to listen to any suggestion, and no boytook it hard if the other fellows made fun when their plan got him intotrouble at home. If a boy came out after some such experience with hisface wet, and his eyes red, and his lips swollen, of course you had tolaugh; he expected it, and you expected him to stone you for laughing.
When a boy's mother had company, he went and hid till the guests weregone, or only came out of concealment to get some sort of shy lunch. Ifthe other fellows' mothers were there, he might be a little bolder, andbring out cake from the second table. But he had to be pretty carefulhow he conformed to any of the usages of grown-up society. A fellow whobrushed his hair, and put on shoes, and came into the parlor when therewas company, was not well seen among the fellows; he was regarded insome degree as a girl-boy; a boy who wished to stand well with otherboys kept in the wood-shed, and only went in as far as the kitchen toget things for his guests in the back-yard. Yet there were mothers whowould make a boy put on a collar when they had company, and disgrace himbefore the world by making him stay round and help; they acted as ifthey had no sense and no pity; but such mothers were rare.
Most mothers yielded to public opinion and let their boys leave thehouse, and wear just what they always wore. I have told how little theywore in summer. Of course in winter they had to put on more things. Inthose days knickerbockers were unknown, and if a boy had appeared inshort pants and long stockings he would have been thought dressed like acircus-actor. Boys wore long pantaloons, like men, as soon as they putoff skirts, and they wore jackets or roundabouts such as the Englishboys still wear at Eton. When the cold weather came they had to put onshoes and stockings, or rather long-legged boots, such as are seen nowonly among lumbermen and teamsters in the country. Most of the fellowshad stoga boots, as heavy as iron and as hard; they were splendid toskate in, they kept your ankles so stiff. Sometimes they greased them tokeep the water out; but they never blacked them except on Sunday, andbefore Saturday they were as red as a rusty stove-pipe. At night theywere always so wet that you could not get them off without a boot-jack,and you could hardly do it anyway; sometimes you got your brother tohelp you off with them, and then he pulled you all round the room. Inthe morning they were dry, but just as hard as stone, and you had tosoap the heel of your woollen sock (which your grandmother had knittedfor you, or maybe some of your aunts) before you could get your foot in,and sometimes the ears of the boot that you pulled it on by would giveway, and you would have to stamp your foot in and kick the toe againstthe mop-board. Then you gasped and limped round, with your feet likefire, till you could get out and limber your boots up in some watersomewhere. About noon your chilblains began.
My boy had his secret longing to be a dandy, and once he was so takenwith a little silk hat at the hat-store that he gave his father no peacetill he got it for him. But the very first time he wore it the boys madefun of it, and that was enough. After that he wore
it several times withstreaming tears; and then he was allowed to lay it aside, and compromiseon an unstylish cap of velvet, which he had despised before. I do notknow why a velvet cap was despised, but it was; a cap with a tassel wasbabyish. The most desired kind of cap was a flat one of blue broadcloth,with a patent-leather peak, and a removable cover of oil-cloth, silk ifyou were rich, cotton if you were poor; when you had pulled the top ofsuch a cap over on one side, you were dressed for conquest, especiallyif you wore your hair long. My boy had such a cap, with a silk oil-clothcover, but his splendor was marred by his short hair.
At one time boots with long, sharp-pointed toes were the fashion, and heso ardently desired a pair of these that fate granted his prayer, butin the ironical spirit which fate usually shows when granting a person'sprayers. These boots were of calf-skin, and they had red leather tops,which you could show by letting your pantaloon-legs carelessly catch onthe ears; but the smallest pair in town was several sizes too large formy boy. The other boys were not slow to discover the fact, and hismartyrdom with these boots began at once. But he was not allowed to givethem up as he did the silk hat; he had to wear them out. However, it didnot take long to wear out a pair of boots in the Boy's Town. A fewweeks' scuffling over the gravelly ground, or a single day's steadysliding made them the subjects for half-soling, and then it was aquestion of only a very little time.
A good many of the boys, though, wore their boots long after they wereworn out, and so they did with the rest of their clothes. I have triedto give some notion of the general distribution of comfort which wasnever riches in the Boy's Town; but I am afraid that I could not paintthe simplicity of things there truly without being misunderstood inthese days of great splendor and great squalor. Everybody had enough,but nobody had too much; the richest man in town might be worth twentythousand dollars. There were distinctions among the grown people, and nodoubt there were the social cruelties which are the modern expression ofthe savage spirit otherwise repressed by civilization; but these wereunknown among the boys. Savages they were, but not that kind of savages.They valued a boy for his character and prowess, and it did not matterin the least that he was ragged and dirty. Their mothers might not allowhim the run of their kitchens quite so freely as some other boys, butthe boys went with him just the same, and they never noticed how littlehe was washed and dressed. The best of them had not an overcoat; andunderclothing was unknown among them. When a boy had buttoned up hisroundabout, and put on his mittens, and tied his comforter round hisneck and over his ears, he was warmly dressed.
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