Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  He passed from the sidewalk into his own yard, with a subdued “Bing!” inflicted upon the stolid person of a gatepost, and, entering the house through the kitchen, ceased to bing for a time. However, driven back from the fore part of the house by a dismal sound of callers, he returned to the kitchen and sat down.

  “Della,” he said to the cook, “do you know what I’d do if you was a crook and I had my ottomatic with me?”

  Della was industrious and preoccupied. “If I was a cook!” she repeated ignorantly, and with no cordiality. “Well, I AM a cook. I’m a-cookin’ right now. Either g’wan in the house where y’b’long, or git out in th’ yard!”

  Penrod chose the latter, and betook himself slowly to the back fence, where he was greeted in a boisterous manner by his wistful little old dog, Duke, returning from some affair of his own in the alley.

  “Get down!” said Penrod coldly, and bestowed a spiritless “Bing!” upon him.

  At this moment a shout was heard from the alley, “Yay, Penrod!” and the sandy head of comrade Sam Williams appeared above the fence.

  “Come on over,” said Penrod.

  As Sam obediently climbed the fence, the little old dog, Duke, moved slowly away, but presently, glancing back over his shoulder and seeing the two boys standing together, he broke into a trot and disappeared round a corner of the house. He was a dog of long and enlightening experience; and he made it clear that the conjunction of Penrod and Sam portended events which, from his point of view, might be unfortunate. Duke had a forgiving disposition, but he also possessed a melancholy wisdom. In the company of either Penrod or Sam, alone, affection often caused him to linger, albeit with a little pessimism, but when he saw them together, he invariably withdrew in as unobtrusive a manner as haste would allow.

  “What you doin’?” Sam asked.

  “Nothin’. What you?”

  “I’ll show you if you’ll come over to our house,” said Sam, who was wearing an important and secretive expression.

  “What for?” Penrod showed little interest.

  “Well, I said I’d show you if you came on over, didn’t I?”

  “But you haven’t got anything I haven’t got,” said Penrod indifferently. “I know everything that’s in your yard and in your stable, and there isn’t a thing—”

  “I didn’t say it was in the yard or in the stable, did I?”

  “Well, there ain’t anything in your house,” returned Penrod frankly, “that I’d walk two feet to look at — not a thing!”

  “Oh, no!” Sam assumed mockery. “Oh, no, you wouldn’t! You know what it is, don’t you? Yes, you do!” Penrod’s curiosity stirred somewhat. “Well, all right,” he said, “I got nothin’ to do. I just as soon go. What is it?”

  “You wait and see,” said Sam, as they climbed the fence. “I bet YOUR ole eyes’ll open pretty far in about a minute or so!”

  “I bet they don’t. It takes a good deal to get me excited, unless it’s sumpthing mighty—”

  “You’ll see!” Sam promised.

  He opened an alley, gate and stepped into his own yard in a manner signalling caution — though the exploit, thus far, certainly required none and Penrod began to be impressed and hopeful. They entered the house, silently, encountering no one, and Sam led the way upstairs, tiptoeing, implying unusual and increasing peril. Turning, in the upper hall, they went into Sam’s father’s bedroom, and Sam closed the door with a caution so genuine that already Penrod’s eyes began to fulfil his host’s prediction. Adventures in another boy’s house are trying to the nerves; and another boy’s father’s bedroom, when invaded, has a violated sanctity that is almost appalling. Penrod felt that something was about to happen — something much more important than he had anticipated.

  Sam tiptoed across the room to a chest of drawers, and, kneeling, carefully pulled out the lowest drawer until the surface of its contents — Mr. Williams’ winter underwear — lay exposed. Then he fumbled beneath the garments and drew forth a large object, displaying it triumphantly to the satisfactorily dumfounded Penrod.

  It was a blue-steel Colt’s revolver, of the heaviest pattern made in the Seventies. Mr. Williams had inherited it from Sam’s grandfather (a small man, a deacon, and dyspeptic) and it was larger and more horrible than any revolver either of the boys had ever seen in any picture, moving or stationary. Moreover, greenish bullets of great size were to be seen in the chambers of the cylinder, suggesting massacre rather than mere murder. This revolver was Real and it was Loaded!

  CHAPTER IV. BINGISM

  BOTH BOYS LIVED breathlessly through a magnificent moment.

  “Leave me have it!” gasped Penrod. “Leave me have hold of it!”

  “You wait a minute!” Sam protested, in a whisper. “I want to show you how I do.”

  “No; you let me show you how I do!” Penrod insisted; and they scuffled for possession.

  “Look out!” Sam whispered warningly. “It might go off.”

  “Then you better leave me have it!” And Penrod, victorious and flushed, stepped back, the weapon in his grasp. “Here,” he said, “this is the way I do: You be a crook; and suppose you got a dagger, and I—”

  “I don’t want any dagger,” Sam protested, advancing. “I want that revolaver. It’s my father’s revolaver, ain’t it?”

  “Well, WAIT a minute, can’t you? I got a right to show you the way I DO, first, haven’t I?” Penrod began an improvisation on the spot. “Say I’m comin’ along after dark like this — look, Sam! And say you try to make a jump at me—”

  “I won’t!” Sam declined this role impatiently. “I guess it ain’t YOUR father’s revolaver, is it?”

  “Well, it may be your father’s but it ain’t yours,” Penrod argued, becoming logical. “It ain’t either’r of us revolaver, so I got as much right—”

  “You haven’t either. It’s my fath—”

  “WATCH, can’t you — just a minute!” Penrod urged vehemently. “I’m not goin’ to keep it, am I? You can have it when I get through, can’t you? Here’s how I do: I’m comin’ along after dark, just walkin’ along this way — like this — look, Sam!”

  Penrod, suiting the action to the word, walked to the other end of the room, swinging the revolver at his side with affected carelessness.

  “I’m just walkin’ along like this, and first I don’t see you,” continued the actor. “Then I kind of get a notion sumpthing wrong’s liable to happen, so I — No!” He interrupted himself abruptly. “No; that isn’t it. You wouldn’t notice that I had my good ole revolaver with me. You wouldn’t think I had one, because it’d be under my coat like this, and you wouldn’t see it.” Penrod stuck the muzzle of the pistol into the waistband of his knickerbockers at the left side and, buttoning his jacket, sustained the weapon in concealment by pressure of his elbow. “So you think I haven’t got any; you think I’m just a man comin’ along, and so you—”

  Sam advanced. “Well, you’ve had your turn,” he said. “Now, it’s mine. I’m goin’ to show you how I—”

  “WATCH me, can’t you?” Penrod wailed. “I haven’t showed you how I do, have I? My goodness! Can’t you watch me a minute?”

  “I HAVE been! You said yourself it’d be my turn soon as you—”

  “My goodness! Let me have a CHANCE, can’t you?” Penrod retreated to the wall, turning his right side toward Sam and keeping the revolver still protected under his coat. “I got to have my turn first, haven’t I?”

  “Well, yours is over long ago.”

  “It isn’t either! I—”

  “Anyway,” said Sam decidedly, clutching him by the right shoulder and endeavouring to reach his left side— “anyway, I’m goin’ to have it now.”

  “You said I could have my turn out!” Penrod, carried away by indignation, raised his voice.

  “I did not!” Sam, likewise lost to caution, asserted his denial loudly.

  “You did, too.”

  “You said—”

  “I never said anything!�
�

  “You said — Quit that!”

  “Boys!” Mrs. Williams, Sam’s mother, opened the door of the room and stood upon the threshold. The scuffling of Sam and Penrod ceased instantly, and they stood hushed and stricken, while fear fell upon them. “Boys, you weren’t quarrelling, were you?”

  “Ma’am?” said Sam.

  “Were you quarrelling with Penrod?”

  “No, ma’am,” answered Sam in a small voice.

  “It sounded like it. What was the matter?”

  Both boys returned her curious glance with meekness. They were summoning their faculties — which were needed. Indeed, these are the crises which prepare a boy for the business difficulties of his later life. Penrod, with the huge weapon beneath his jacket, insecurely supported by an elbow and by a waistband which he instantly began to distrust, experienced distressful sensations similar to those of the owner of too heavily insured property carrying a gasoline can under his overcoat and detained for conversation by a policeman. And if, in the coming years it was to be Penrod’s lot to find himself in that precise situation, no doubt he would be the better prepared for it on account of this present afternoon’s experience under the scalding eye of Mrs. Williams. It should be added that Mrs. Williams’s eye was awful to the imagination only. It was a gentle eye and but mildly curious, having no remote suspicion of the dreadful truth, for Sam had backed upon the chest of drawers and closed the damnatory open one with the calves of his legs.

  Sam, not bearing the fatal evidence upon his person, was in a better state than Penrod, though when boys fall into the stillness now assumed by these two, it should be understood that they are suffering. Penrod, in fact, was the prey to apprehension so keen that the actual pit of his stomach was cold.

  Being the actual custodian of the crime, he understood that his case was several degrees more serious than that of Sam, who, in the event of detection, would be convicted as only an accessory. It was a lesson, and Penrod already repented his selfishness in not allowing Sam to show how he did, first.

  “You’re sure you weren’t quarrelling, Sam?” said Mrs. Williams.

  “No, ma’am; we were just talking.”

  Still she seemed dimly uneasy, and her eye swung to Penrod.

  “What were you and Sam talking about, Penrod!”

  “Ma’am?”

  “What were you talking about?”

  Penrod gulped invisibly.

  “Well,” he murmured, “it wasn’t much. Different things.”

  “What things?”

  “Oh, just sumpthing. Different things.”

  “I’m glad you weren’t quarrelling,” said Mrs. Williams, reassured by this reply, which, though somewhat baffling, was thoroughly familiar to her ear. “Now, if you’ll come downstairs, I’ll give you each one cookie and no more, so your appetites won’t be spoiled for your dinners.”

  She stood, evidently expecting them to precede her. To linger might renew vague suspicion, causing it to become more definite; and boys preserve themselves from moment to moment, not often attempting to secure the future. Consequently, the apprehensive Sam and the unfortunate Penrod (with the monstrous implement bulking against his ribs) walked out of the room and down the stairs, their countenances indicating an interior condition of solemnity. And a curious shade of behaviour might have here interested a criminologist. Penrod endeavoured to keep as close to Sam as possible, like a lonely person seeking company, while, on the other hand, Sam kept moving away from Penrod, seeming to desire an appearance of aloofness.

  “Go into the library, boys,” said Mrs. Williams, as the three reached the foot of the stairs. “I’ll bring you your cookies. Papa’s in there.”

  Under her eye the two entered the library, to find Mr. Williams reading his evening paper. He looked up pleasantly, but it seemed to Penrod that he had an ominous and penetrating expression.

  “What have you been up to, you boys?” inquired this enemy.

  “Nothing,” said Sam. “Different things.”

  “What like?”

  “Oh — just different things.”

  Mr. Williams nodded; then his glance rested casually upon Penrod.

  “What’s the matter with your arm, Penrod?”

  Penrod became paler, and Sam withdrew from him almost conspicuously.

  “Sir?”

  “I said, What’s the matter with your arm?”

  “Which one?” Penrod quavered.

  “Your left. You seem to be holding it at an unnatural position. Have you hurt it?”

  Penrod swallowed. “Yes, sir. A boy bit me — I mean a dog — a dog bit me.”

  Mr. Williams murmured sympathetically: “That’s too bad! Where did he bite you?”

  “On the — right on the elbow.”

  “Good gracious! Perhaps you ought to have it cauterized.”

  “Sir?”

  “Did you have a doctor look at it?”

  “No, sir. My mother put some stuff from the drug store on it.”

  “Oh, I see. Probably it’s all right, then.”

  “Yes, sir.” Penrod drew breath more freely, and accepted the warm cookie Mrs. Williams brought him. He ate it without relish.

  “You can have only one apiece,” she said. “It’s too near dinner-time. You needn’t beg for any more, because you can’t have ’em.”

  They were good about that; they were in no frame of digestion for cookies.

  “Was it your own dog that bit you?” Mr. Williams inquired.

  “Sir? No, sir. It wasn’t Duke.”

  “Penrod!” Mrs. Williams exclaimed. “When did it happen?”

  “I don’t remember just when,” he answered feebly. “I guess it was day before yesterday.”

  “Gracious! How did it—”

  “He — he just came up and bit me.”

  “Why, that’s terrible! It might be dangerous for other children,” said Mrs. Williams, with a solicitous glance at Sam. “Don’t you know whom he belongs to?”

  “No’m. It was just a dog.”

  “You poor boy! Your mother must have been dreadfully frightened when you came home and she saw—”

  She was interrupted by the entrance of a middle-aged coloured woman. “Miz Williams,” she began, and then, as she caught sight of Penrod, she addressed him directly, “You’ ma telefoam if you here, send you home right away, ‘cause they waitin’ dinner on you.”

  “Run along, then,” said Mrs. Williams, patting the visitor lightly upon his shoulder; and she accompanied him to the front door. “Tell your mother I’m so sorry about your getting bitten, and you must take good care of it, Penrod.”

  “Yes’m.”

  Penrod lingered helplessly outside the doorway, looking at Sam, who stood partially obscured in the hall, behind Mrs. Williams. Penrod’s eyes, with veiled anguish, conveyed a pleading for help as well as a horror of the position in which he found himself. Sam, however, pale and determined, seemed to have assumed a stony attitude of detachment, as if it were well understood between them that his own comparative innocence was established, and that whatever catastrophe ensued, Penrod had brought it on and must bear the brunt of it alone.

  “Well, you’d better run along, since they’re waiting for you at home,” said Mrs. Williams, closing the door. “Good-night, Penrod.”

  ... Ten minutes later Penrod took his place at his own dinner-table, somewhat breathless but with an expression of perfect composure.

  “Can’t you EVER come home without being telephoned for?” demanded his father.

  “Yes, sir.” And Penrod added reproachfully, placing the blame upon members of Mr. Schofield’s own class, “Sam’s mother and father kept me, or I’d been home long ago. They would keep on talkin’, and I guess I had to be POLITE, didn’t I?”

  His left arm was as free as his right; there was no dreadful bulk beneath his jacket, and at Penrod’s age the future is too far away to be worried about the difference between temporary security and permanent security is left for grown peopl
e. To Penrod, security was security, and before his dinner was half eaten his spirit had become fairly serene.

  Nevertheless, when he entered the empty carriage-house of the stable, on his return from school the next afternoon, his expression was not altogether without apprehension, and he stood in the doorway looking well about him before he lifted a loosened plank in the flooring and took from beneath it the grand old weapon of the Williams family. Not did his eye lighten with any pleasurable excitement as he sat himself down in a shadowy corner and began some sketchy experiments with the mechanism. The allure of first sight was gone. In Mr. Williams’ bedchamber, with Sam clamouring for possession, it had seemed to Penrod that nothing in the world was so desirable as to have that revolver in his own hands — it was his dream come true. But, for reasons not definitely known to him, the charm had departed; he turned the cylinder gingerly, almost with distaste; and slowly there stole over him a feeling that there was something repellent and threatening in the heavy blue steel.

  Thus does the long-dreamed Real misbehave — not only for Penrod!

  More out of a sense of duty to bingism in general than for any other reason, he pointed the revolver at the lawn-mower, and gloomily murmured, “Bing!”

  Simultaneously, a low and cautious voice sounded from the yard outside, “Yay, Penrod!” and Sam Williams darkened the doorway, his eye falling instantly upon the weapon in his friend’s hand. Sam seemed relieved to see it.

  “You didn’t get caught with it, did you?” he said hastily.

  Penrod shook his head, rising.

  “I guess not! I guess I got SOME brains around me,” he added, inspired by Sam’s presence to assume a slight swagger. “They’d have to get up pretty early to find any good ole revolaver, once I got MY hands on it!”

  “I guess we can keep it, all right,” Sam said confidentially. “Because this morning papa was putting on his winter underclothes and he found it wasn’t there, and they looked all over and everywhere, and he was pretty mad, and said he knew it was those cheap plumbers stole it that mamma got instead of the regular plumbers he always used to have, and he said there wasn’t any chance ever gettin’ it back, because you couldn’t tell which one took it, and they’d all swear it wasn’t them. So it looks like we could keep it for our revolaver, Penrod, don’t it? I’ll give you half of it.”