Boy's Town

by William Dean Howells

  XV.

  MY BOY.

  EVERY boy is two or three boys, or twenty or thirty different kinds ofboys in one; he is all the time living many lives and forming manycharacters; but it is a good thing if he can keep one life and onecharacter when he gets to be a man. He may turn out to be like an onionwhen he is grown up, and be nothing but hulls, that you keep peelingoff, one after another, till you think you have got down to the heart,at last, and then you have got down to nothing.

  All the boys may have been like my boy in the Boy's Town, in having eachan inward being that was not the least like their outward being, butthat somehow seemed to be their real self, whether it truly was so ornot. But I am certain that this was the case with him, and that while hewas joyfully sharing the wild sports and conforming to the savage usagesof the boy's world about him, he was dwelling in a wholly differentworld within him, whose wonders no one else knew. I could not tell nowthese wonders any more than he could have told them then; but it was aworld of dreams, of hopes, of purposes, which he would have been moreashamed to avow for himself than I should be to avow for him. It was allvague and vast, and it came out of the books that he read, and thatfilled his soul with their witchery, and often held him aloof withtheir charm in the midst of the plays from which they could not lurehim wholly away, or at all away. He did not know how or when theirenchantment began, and he could hardly recall the names of some of themafterwards. First of them was Goldsmith's "History of Greece," whichmade him an Athenian of Pericles's time, and Goldsmith's "History ofRome," which naturalized him in a Roman citizenship chiefly employed inslaying tyrants; from the time of Appius Claudius down to the time ofDomitian, there was hardly a tyrant that he did not slay. After he hadread these books, not once or twice, but twenty times over, his fatherthought fit to put into his hands "The Travels of Captain Ashe in NorthAmerica," to encourage, or perhaps to test, his taste for usefulreading; but this was a failure. The captain's travels were printed withlong esses, and the boy could make nothing of them, for other reasons.The fancy nourished upon

  "The glory that was Greece And the grandeur that was Rome,"

  starved amidst the robust plenty of the Englishman's criticisms of ourearly manners and customs. Neither could money hire the boy to read"Malte-Brun's Geography," in three large folios, of a thousand pageseach, for which there was a standing offer of fifty cents from thefather, who had never been able to read it himself. But shortly after hefailed so miserably with Captain Ashe, the boy came into possession of apriceless treasure. It was that little treatise on "Greek and RomanMythology" which I have mentioned, and which he must literally have wornout with reading, since no fragment of it seems to have survived hisboyhood. Heaven knows who wrote it or published it; his father boughtit with a number of other books at an auction, and the boy, who hadabout that time discovered the chapter on prosody in the back part ofhis grammar, made poems from it for years, and appeared in manytransfigurations, as this and that god and demigod and hero uponimagined occasions in the Boy's Town, to the fancied admiration of allthe other fellows. I do not know just why he wished to appear to hisgrandmother in a vision; now as Mercury with winged feet, now as Apollowith his drawn bow, now as Hercules leaning upon his club and restingfrom his Twelve Labors. Perhaps it was because he thought that hisgrandmother, who used to tell the children about her life in Wales, andshow them the picture of a castle where she had once slept when she wasa girl, would appreciate him in these apotheoses. If he believed theywould make a vivid impression upon the sweet old Quaker lady, no doubthe was right.

  There was another book which he read about this time, and that was "TheGreek Soldier." It was the story of a young Greek, a glorious Athenian,who had fought through the Greek war of independence against the Turks,and then come to America and published the narrative of his adventures.They fired my boy with a retrospective longing to have been present atthe Battle of Navarino, when the allied ships of the English, French,and Russians destroyed the Turkish fleet; but it seemed to him that hecould not have borne to have the allies impose a king upon the Greeks,when they really wanted a republic, and so he was able to consolehimself for having been absent. He did what he could in fighting the warover again, and he intended to harden himself for the long struggle bysleeping on the floor, as the Greek soldier had done. But the childrenoften fell asleep on the floor in the warmth of the hearth-fire; and hispreparation for the patriotic strife was not distinguishable in itspractical effect from a reluctance to go to bed at the right hour.

  Captain Riley's narrative of his shipwreck on the coast of Africa, andhis captivity among the Arabs, was a book which my boy and his brotherprized with a kind of personal interest, because their father told themthat he had once seen a son of Captain Riley when he went to get hisappointment of collector at Columbus, and that this son was namedWilliam Willshire Riley, after the good English merchant, WilliamWillshire, who had ransomed Captain Riley. William Willshire seemed tothem almost the best man who ever lived; though my boy had secretly agreater fondness for the Arab, Sidi Hamet, who was kind to Captain Rileyand kept his brother Seid from ill-treating him whenever he could.Probably the boy liked him better because the Arab was more picturesquethan the Englishman. The whole narrative was very interesting; it had avein of sincere and earnest piety in it which was not its least charm,and it was written in a style of old-fashioned stateliness which was notwithout its effect with the boys.

  Somehow they did not think of the Arabs in this narrative as of the samerace and faith with the Arabs of Bagdad and the other places in the"Arabian Nights." They did not think whether these were Mohammedans ornot; they naturalized them in the fairy world where all boys arecitizens, and lived with them there upon the same familiar terms as theylived with Robinson Crusoe. Their father once told them that RobinsonCrusoe had robbed the real narrative of Alexander Selkirk of the placeit ought to have held in the remembrance of the world; and my boy had afeeling of guilt in reading it, as if he were making himself theaccomplice of an impostor. He liked the "Arabian Nights," but oddlyenough these wonderful tales made no such impression on his fancy as thestories in a wretchedly inferior book made. He did not know the name ofthis book, or who wrote it; from which I imagine that much of hisreading was of the purblind sort that ignorant grown-up people do,without any sort of literary vision. He read this book perpetually, whenhe was not reading his "Greek and Roman Mythology;" and then suddenly,one day, as happens in childhood with so many things, it vanished out ofhis possession as if by magic. Perhaps he lost it; perhaps he lent it;at any rate it was gone, and he never got it back, and he never knewwhat book it was till thirty years afterwards, when he picked up from afriend's library-table a copy of "Gesta Romanorum," and recognized inthis collection of old monkish legends the long-missing treasure of hisboyhood. These stories, without beauty of invention, without art ofconstruction or character, without spirituality in their crudematerialization, which were read aloud in the refectories of mediaevalcloisters while the monks sat at meat, laid a spell upon the soul of theboy that governed his life. He conformed his conduct to the principlesand maxims which actuated the behavior of the shadowy people of thesedry-as-dust tales; he went about drunk with the fumes of fables aboutRoman emperors that never were, in an empire that never was; and, thoughthey tormented him by putting a mixed and impossible civilization in theplace of that he knew from his Goldsmith, he was quite helpless to breakfrom their influence. He was always expecting some wonderful thing tohappen to him as things happened there in fulfilment of some saying orprophecy; and at every trivial moment he made sayings and prophecies forhimself, which he wished events to fulfil. One Sunday when he waswalking in an alley behind one of the stores, he found a fur cap thathad probably fallen out of the store-loft window. He ran home with it,and in his simple-hearted rapture he told his mother that as soon as hepicked it up there came into his mind the words, "He who picketh up thiscap picketh up a fortune," and he could hardly wait for Monday to comeand let him restore the cap to
its owner and receive an enduringprosperity in reward of his virtue. Heaven knows what form he expectedthis to take; but when he found himself in the store, he lost allcourage; his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, and he could notutter a syllable of the fine phrases he had made to himself. He laid thecap on the counter without a word; the storekeeper came up and took itin his hand. "What's this?" he said. "Why, this is ours," and he tossedthe cap into a loose pile of hats by the showcase, and the boy slunkout, cut to the heart and crushed to the dust. It was such a crueldisappointment and mortification that it was rather a relief to have hisbrother mock him, and come up and say from time to time, "He who pickethup this cap picketh up a fortune," and then split into a jeering laugh.At least he could fight his brother, and, when he ran, could stone him;and he could throw quads and quoins, and pieces of riglet at the jourprinters when the story spread to them, and one of them would begin, "Hewho picketh--"

  He was not different from other boys in his desire to localize, torealize, what he read; and he was always contriving in fancy scenes andencounters of the greatest splendor, in which he bore a chief part.Inwardly he was all thrones, principalities, and powers, the foe oftyrants, the friend of good emperors, and the intimate of magicians, andmagnificently apparelled; outwardly he was an incorrigible littlesloven, who suffered in all social exigencies from the direstbashfulness, and wished nothing so much as to shrink out of the sight ofmen if they spoke to him. He could not help revealing sometimes to thekindness of his father and mother the world of foolish dreams one halfof him lived in, while the other half swam, and fished, and hunted, andran races, and played tops and marbles, and squabbled and scuffled inthe Boy's Town. Very likely they sympathized with him more than they lethim know; they encouraged his reading, and the father directed his tasteas far as might be, especially in poetry. The boy liked to make poetry,but he preferred to read prose, though he listened to the poems hisfather read aloud, so as to learn how they were made. He learned certainpieces by heart, like "The Turk lay dreaming of the hour," and "Pity thesorrows of a poor old man," and he was fond of some passages that hisfather wished him to know in Thomson's "Seasons." There were some ofMoore's songs, too, that he was fond of, such as "When in death I shallcalm recline," and "It was noon and on flowers that ranged all around."He learned these by heart, to declaim at school, where he spoke, "On thebanks of the Danube fair Adelaide hied," from Campbell; but he couldhardly speak the "Soldier's Dream" for the lump that came into histhroat at the lines,

  "My little ones kissed me a thousand times o'er, And my wife sobbed aloud in her fulness of heart.

  "'Stay, stay with us! Stay! Thou art weary and worn!' And fain was their war-broken soldier to stay; But sorrow returned at the dawning of morn, And the voice in my dreaming ear melted away!"

  He was himself both the war-broken soldier and the little ones thatkissed him, in the rapture of this now old-fashioned music, and he wokewith pangs of heartbreak in the very person of the dreamer.

  But he could not make anything either of Byron or Cowper; and he did noteven try to read the little tree-calf volumes of Homer and Virgil whichhis father had in the versions of Pope and Dryden; the smallcopperplates with which they were illustrated conveyed no suggestion tohim. Afterwards he read Goldsmith's "Deserted Village," and he formed agreat passion for Pope's "Pastorals," which he imitated in their easyheroics; but till he came to read Longfellow, and Tennyson, and Heine,he never read any long poem without more fatigue than pleasure. Hisfather used to say that the taste for poetry was an acquired taste, likethe taste for tomatoes, and that he would come to it yet; but he nevercame to it, or so much of it as some people seemed to do, and he alwayshad his sorrowful misgivings as to whether they liked it as much as theypretended. I think, too, that it should be a flavor, a spice, a sweet, adelicate relish in the high banquet of literature, and never a chiefdish; and I should not know how to defend my boy for trying to make longpoems of his own at the very time when he found it so hard to read otherpeople's long poems.

  He had no conception of authorship as a vocation in life, and he didnot know why he wanted to make poetry. After first flaunting his skillin it before the boys, and getting one of them into trouble by writing alove-letter for him to a girl at school, and making the girl cry at athing so strange and puzzling as a love-letter in rhyme, he preferred toconceal his gift. It became

  "His shame in crowds--his solitary pride,"

  and he learned to know that it was considered _soft_ to write poetry, asindeed it mostly is. He himself regarded with contempt a young man whohad printed a piece of poetry in his father's newspaper and put his ownname to it. He did not know what he would not have done sooner thanprint poetry and put his name to it; and he was melted with confusionwhen a girl who was going to have a party came to him at theprinting-office and asked him to make her the invitations in verse. Theprinters laughed, and it seemed to the boy that he could never get overit.

  But such disgraces are soon lived down, even at ten years, and a greatnew experience which now came to him possibly helped the boy to forget.This was the theatre, which he had sometimes heard his father speak of.There had once been a theatre in the Boy's Town, when a strollingcompany came up from Cincinnati, and opened for a season in an emptypork-house. But that was a long time ago, and, though he had written atragedy, all that the boy knew of a theatre was from a picture in aSunday-school book where a stage scene was given to show what kind ofdesperate amusements a person might come to in middle life if he beganby breaking the Sabbath in his youth. His brother had once been taken toa theatre in Pittsburgh by one of their river-going uncles, and heoften told about it; but my boy formed no conception of the beautifulreality from his accounts of a burglar who jumped from a roof and waschased by a watchman with a pistol up and down a street with housespainted on a curtain.

  "THE BEACON OF DEATH."]

  The company which came to the Boy's Town in his time was again fromCincinnati, and it was under the management of the father and mother oftwo actresses, afterwards famous, who were then children, just startingupon their career. These pretty little creatures took the leading partsin "Bombastes Furioso," the first night my boy ever saw a play, and heinstantly fell impartially in love with both of them, and tacitlyremained their abject slave for a great while after. When the smaller ofthem came out with a large pair of stage boots in one hand and a drawnsword in the other, and said,

  "Whoever dares these boots displace Shall meet Bombastes face to face,"

  if the boy had not already been bereft of his senses by the melodramapreceding the burlesque, he must have been transported by her beauty,her grace, her genius. He, indeed, gave her and her sister his heart,but his mind was already gone, rapt from him by the adorable pirate whofought a losing fight with broadswords, two up and two down--click-click,click-click--and died all over the deck of the pirate ship in theopening piece. This was called the "Beacon of Death," and the scenerepresented the forecastle of the pirate ship with a lantern danglingfrom the rigging, to lure unsuspecting merchantmen to their doom.Afterwards, the boy remembered nothing of the story, but a scrap of thedialogue meaninglessly remained with him; and when the pirate captainappeared with his bloody crew and said, hoarsely, "Let us go below andget some brandy!" the boy would have bartered all his hopes of bliss tohave been that abandoned ruffian. In fact, he always liked, and longedto be, the villain, rather than any other person in the play, and he soglutted himself with crime of every sort in his tender years at thetheatre that he afterwards came to be very tired of it, and avoided theplays and novels that had very marked villains in them.

  He was in an ecstasy as soon as the curtain rose that night, and helived somewhere out of his body as long as the playing lasted, which waswell on to midnight; for in those days the theatre did not meanly putthe public off with one play, but gave it a heartful and its money'sworth with three. On his first night my boy saw "The Beacon of Death,""Bom
bastes Furioso," and "Black-eyed Susan," and he never afterwards sawless than three plays each night, and he never missed a night, as longas the theatre languished in the unfriendly air of that mainlyCalvinistic community, where the theatre was regarded by most goodpeople as the eighth of the seven deadly sins. The whole day long hedwelt in a dream of it that blotted out, or rather consumed with moreeffulgent brightness, all the other day-dreams he had dreamed before,and his heart almost burst with longing to be a villain like thosevillains on the stage, to have a moustache--a black moustache--such asthey wore at a time when every one off the stage was clean shaven, andsomehow to end bloodily, murderously, as became a villain.

  I dare say this was not quite a wholesome frame of mind for a boy of tenyears; but I do not defend it; I only portray it. Being the boy he was,he was destined somehow to dwell half the time in a world of dreamery;and I have tried to express how, when he had once got enough ofvillainy, he reformed his ideals and rather liked virtue. At any rate,it was a phase of being that could not have been prevented withoutliterally destroying him, and I feel pretty sure that his father didwell to let him have his fill of the theatre at once. He could not haveknown of the riot of emotions behind the child's shy silence, or howcontinually he was employed in dealing death to all the good people inthe pieces he saw or imagined. This the boy could no more have sufferedto appear than his passion for those lovely little girls, for whose sakehe somehow perpetrated these wicked deeds. The theatre bills, large andsmall, were printed in his father's office, and sometimes the amiablemanager and his wife strolled in with the copy. The boy always wildlyhoped and feared they would bring the little girls with them, but theynever did, and he contented himself with secretly adoring the father andmother, doubly divine as their parents and as actors. They were on easyterms with the roller-boy, the wretch who shot turtle-doves with noregard for their symbolical character, and they joked with him, in alight give-and-take that smote my boy with an anguish of envy. It wouldhave been richly enough for him to pass the least word with them; alook, a smile from them would have been bliss; but he shrank out oftheir way; and once when he met them in the street, and they seemed tobe going to speak to him, he ran so that they could not.