A WAIL IN B MINOR

Oh, what has become of the ornery boy,
Who used to chew slip’ry elm, “rosum” and wheat:
And say “jest a coddin’” and “what d’ye soy;”
And wear rolled-up trousers all out at the seat?

And where is the boy who had shows in the barn,
And “skinned a cat backards” and turned “summersets;”
The boy who had faith in a snake-feeder yarn,
And always smoked grape vine and corn cigarettes?

Where now is the small boy who spat on his bait,
And proudly stood down near the foot of the class,
And always went “barefooted” early and late,
And washed his feet nights on the dew of the grass?

Where is the boy who could swim on his back,
And dive and tread water and lay his hair, too;
The boy who would jump off the spring-board ker-whack,
And light on his stomach as I used to do?

Oh where and oh where is the old-fashioned boy?
Has the old-fashioned boy with his old-fashioned ways,
Been crowded aside by the Lord Fauntleroy,
The cheap tinselled make-believe, full of alloy
Without the pure gold of the rollicking joy
Of the old-fashioned boy in the old-fashioned days?

His mother named him Harold, and named him better than she knew. He was just such a boy as one would expect to see bearing a heroic name. He had big, faded blue eyes, a nubbin of a chin, wide, wondering ears, and freckles such brown blotches of freckles on his face and neck and hands, such a milky way of them across the bridge of his snub nose, that the boys called him “Mealy.” And Mealy Jones it was to the end. When his parents called him Harold in the hearing of his playmates, the boy was ashamed, for he felt that a nickname gave him equal standing among his fellows. There were times in his life when he was alone, recounting his valorous deeds that Mealy more than half persuaded himself that he was a real boy. But when he was with Winfield Pennington, surnamed “Piggy” in the court of Boyville, and Abraham Lincoln Carpenter, similarly knighted “Old Abe,” Mealy saw that he was only Harold, a weak and unsatisfactory imitation. He was handicapped in his struggle to be a natural boy by a mother who had been a “perfect little lady” in her girlhood and who was moulding her son in the forms that fashioned her. If it were the purpose of this tale to deal in philosophy, it would be easy to digress and show that Mealy Jones was a study in heredity; that from his mother’s side of the house he inherited wide, white, starched collars, and from his father’s side, a burning desire to spit through his teeth. But this is only a simple tale, with no great problem in it, save that of a boy working out his salvation between a fiendish lust for suspenders with trousers and a long-termed incarceration in ruffled waists with despised white china buttons around his waist-band.

No one but Piggy ever knew how Mealy Jones learned to swim; and Harold’s mother doesn’t consider Piggy Pennington any one, for the Penningtons are Methodists and the Joneses are Baptists, and Very hard-shelled ones, too. However, Mealy Jones did learn to swim “dog-fashion” years and years after the others had become post-graduates in aquatic lore and could “tread water,” “swim sailor-fashion,” and “lay” their hair. Mrs. Jones permitted her son to go swimming occasionally, but she always exacted from him a solemn promise not to go into the deep water. And Harold, who was a good little boy, made it a point not to “let down” when he was beyond the “step-off.” So of course he could not know how deep it was; although the bad little boys who “brought up bottom” had told him that it was twelve feet deep.

One hot June afternoon Mealy stood looking at a druggist’s display window, gazing idly at the pills, absently picking out the various kinds which he had taken. He had just come from his mother with the expressed injunction not to go near the river. His eyes roamed listlessly from the pills to the pain-killer, and; turning wearily away, he saw Piggy and Old Abe and Jimmy Sears. The three boys were scuffling for, the possession of a piece of rope. Pausing a moment in front of the grocery store, they beckoned for Mealy. The lad joined the group. Some one said,

“Come on, Mealy, and go swimmin’.”

“Aw, Mealy can’t go,” put in Jimmy; “his ma won’t let him.”

“Yes, I kin, too, if I want to,” replied Mealy, stoutly but, alas! guiltily.

“Then come on,” said Piggy Pennington. “You don’t dast. My ma don’t care how often I go in only in dog days.”

After some desultory debate they started the four boys pushing one another off the sidewalk, “rooster-fighting,” shouting, laughing, racing through the streets. Mealy Jones longed to have the other boys observe his savage behavior. He knew, however, that he was not of them, that he was a sad make-believe. The guilt of the deed he was doing, oppressed him. He wondered how he could go into crime so stolidly. Inwardly he quaked as he recalled the stories he had read of boys who had drowned while disobeying their parents. His uneasiness was increased by the ever-present sense that he could not cope with the other boys at their sports. He let them jostle him, and often would run, after his self-respect would goad him to jostle back. Mealy was glad when the group came to the deep shade of the woods and walked slowly.

It was three o’clock when the boys reached the swimming-hole. There the great elm-tree, with its ladder of exposed roots, stretched over the water. Piggy Pennington, stripped to the skin, ran whooping down the sloping bank, splashed over the gravel at the water’s edge, and plunged into the deepest water. Old Abe followed cautiously, bathing his temples and his wrists before sousing all over. Jimmy Sears threw his shirt high up on the bank as he stood ankle-deep in the stream. Piggy’s exhilaration having worn off by this time, he picked up a mussel-shell and threw it at Jimmy’s feet. The water dashed wide of its mark and sprinkled Mealy, who was sitting on a log, taking off his shoes.

“Here, Piggy, you quit that,” said Mealy.

Jimmy said nothing. He sprang into the air head foremost toward Piggy, who dived from sight. His pursuer saw the direction Piggy took and followed him. The boys were a few feet apart when Jimmy came to the surface, puffing and spouting and shaking the water from his eyes and hair. He hesitated in his pursuit. Piggy observed the hesitation, and with a quick overhand movement shot a stinging stream of water from the ball of his hand into his antagonist’s face. Then Piggy turned on his side and swam swiftly to shallow water, where he stood and splashed his victim, who was lumbering toward shore with his eyes shut, panting loudly. With every splash Piggy said, “How’s that, Jim?” or “Take a bite o’ this,” or “Want a drink?” When Jimmy got where he could walk on the creek bottom, he made a feint of fighting back, but he soon ceased, and stood by, gasping for breath, before saying, “Let’s quit.”

Then followed the fun of ducking, the scuffling and the capers of the young human animals at play at play even as gods in the elder days. Mealy saw it all through envious eyes and with a pricking conscience, as he doggedly fumbled the myriad buttons which his mother had fastened upon his pretty clothes. He heard Piggy dare Abe across the creek, and call him a cowardly calf, and say, “Any one’t ’ull take a dare’ll steal sheep.” Mealy saw Jimmy grin as he cracked rocks under water while the other boys were diving, and watched Old Abe, as he made the waves rise under his chin, swimming after the fleeing culprit. He saw Abe catch Jimmy and hold his head under water until Mealy’s smile faded to a horrified grin. Then he saw the victim and the victor come merrily to the shallows, laughing as though nothing unusual had occurred. It was high revel in Boyville, and the satyrs were in the midst of their joy.

Then Mealy heard Piggy say, “Aw, come in, Mealy; it won’t hurt you.”

“Is it cold?” asked Mealy.

“Naw,” replied Piggy.

“Naw, course it ain’t,” returned Jimmy.

“Warm as dish-water,” cried Abe.

Mealy’s ribs shone through his skin. His big milky eyes made him seem uncanny, standing there shivering in the shade. He hobbled down the pebbly bank on his tender feet, his bashful grin breaking into a dozen contortions of pain as he went. The boys stood watching him like tigers awaiting a Christian martyr. He paused at the water’s edge, put in a toe and jerked it out with a spasm of cold.

“Aw, that ain’t cold,” said Piggy.

“Naw, when you get in you won’t mind it,” insisted Abe.

Mealy replied, “Oo, oo! I think that’s pretty cold.”

“Wet your legs and you won’t get the cramp,” advised Jimmy Sears.

Mealy stooped over to scoop up some water in his hands. He heard the boys laugh, and the next instant felt a shower of water on his back. It made the tears come.

“Uhm-m-m no fair splashin’,” he whined.

Mealy put one foot in the water and drew it out quickly, gasping, “Oo! I ain’t goin’ in. It’s too cold for me. It’ll bring my measles out.” He started trembling up the bank; then he heard a splashing behind him.

“Come back here,” cried Piggy, whose hands were uplifted; “come back here and git in this water or I’ll muddy you.” Piggy’s hands were full of mud. He was about to throw it when the Jones boy pretended to laugh and giggled, “Oh, I was just a-foolin’.”

But he paused again at the water’s edge, and Piggy, who had come up close enough to touch the rickety lad, reached out a muddy hand and dabbed the quaking boy’s breast. The other boys roared with glee. Mealy extended a deprecatory hand, and took Piggy’s wet, glistening arm and stumbled nervously into the stream, with an “Oo-oo!” at every uncertain step. When the water came to Mealy’s waist Abe cried, “Duck! duck, or I’ll splash you!” The boy sank down, with his teeth biting his tongue as he said, “Oo! I wouldn’t do you that way.”

When the shock of the tepid water had spent itself, Mealy’s grin returned, and he shivered happily, “Oo it’s good, ain’t it?”

Ten minutes later the boys were diving from the roots of the elm-tree into the deep water on the other side of the creek. Ten minutes after that they were sliding down a muddy toboggan which they had revived by splashing water upon the incline made and provided by the town boys for scudding. Ten minutes afterward they were covering themselves with coats of mud, adorned one with stripes made with the point of a stick, another with polka-dots, another with checks, and Mealy with snake-like, curving stripes. Then the whole crew dashed down the path to the railroad bridge to greet the afternoon passenger train. When it came they jumped up and down and waved their striped and spotted arms like the barbarian warriors which they fancied they were. They swam up the stream leisurely, and, as they rounded the bend that brought their landing-place into view, the quick eye of Piggy Pennington saw that some one had been meddling with their clothes. He gave the alarm. The boys quickened their strokes. When they came to the shallows of the ford they saw the blue-and-white starched shirt of Mealy Jones lying in a pool tied into half a dozen knots, with the water soaking them tighter and tighter. The other boys’ clothes were not disturbed.

“Mealy’s got to chaw beef,” cried Piggy Pennington. The other boys echoed Piggy’s merriment. Great sorrows come to grown-up people, but there is never a moment in after-life more poignant with grief than, that which stabs a boy when he learns that he must wrestle with a series of water-soaked knots in a shirt. As Mealy sat in the broiling sun, gripping the knots with his teeth and fingers, he asked himself again and again how he could explain his soiled shirt to his mother. Lump after lump rose in his throat, and dissolved into tears that trickled down his nose. The other boys did not heed him. They were following Piggy’s dare, dropping into the water from the overhanging limb of the elm-tree.

They did not see the figure of another boy, in a gingham shirt, blue overalls, and a torn straw hat, sitting on a stone back of Mealy, smiling complacently. Not until the stranger walked down to the water’s edge where Mealy sat did the other boys spy him.

“Who is it?” asked Abe.

“I never saw him before,” replied Jimmy Sears.

“Oh, I’ll tell you who it is,” returned Abe, after looking the stranger over. “It’s the new boy. Him an’ his old man come to town yesterday. They say he’s a fighter. He licked every boy in the Mountain Jumpers this mornin’.”

By this time the new boy was standing over Mealy, saying, “How you gittin’ along?”

Mealy looked up, and said with the petulance of a spoiled child, “Hush your mouth, you old smartie! What good d’t do you to go an’ tie my clo’es?”

Piggy and Jimmy and Abe came hurrying to the landing. They heard the new boy retort, “Who said I tied your clo’es?” Mealy made no reply. The new boy repeated the query. Mealy saw the boys in the water looking on, and his courage rose; for Mealy was in the primary department of life, and had not yet learned that one must fight alone. He answered, “I did,” with an emphasis on the “I,” as he tugged at the last knot. The new boy had been looking Mealy over, and he replied quickly, “You’re a liar!”

There was a pause, during which Mealy looked helplessly for some one to defend him. He was sure that his companions would not stand there and see him whipped. One of the boys in the water said diplomatically, “Aw, Mealy, I wouldn’t take that!”

“You’re another,” faltered Mealy, who looked supplication and surprise at his friends, and wondered if they were really going to desert him. The new boy waded around Mealy, and leaned over him, and said, shaking his fist in the freckled face, “You’re a coward, and you don’t dast take it up and fight it out.”

Mealy’s cheeks flushed. He felt anger mantling his frame. He was one of those most pitiable of mortals whose anger brings tears with it. The last knot in the shirt was all but conquered, when Mealy bawled in a scream of passionate sobs,

“When I git this shirt fixed I’ll show you who’s a coward.”

The new boy sought a level place on the bank for a fight, and sneered, “Oh, cry baby! cry baby! Say, boys, where’s its bottle?”

Mealy rose with a stone in each hand, and hobbled over the pebbles, trying, “Touch me now! Touch me if you dare!”

“Aw, you coward! drop them rocks,” snarled the new boy.

Mealy looked at his friends imploringly. He felt lonely, deserted, and mistreated, but he saw in the faces of his comrades the reflection of the injunction to put down the stones. He did so, and his anger began to cool. But he whimpered again, “Well now, touch me if you dare!”

The new boy came over briskly, and made a feint to slap the naked lad, who warded off the blow, sniffling, “You just leave me alone. I ain’t hurtin’ you.” The boys in the water laughed it seemed to Mealy such a cruel laugh. Anger enveloped him again, and he struck out blindly through his tears, hand over hand, striking the new boy in the mouth and making it bleed, before he realized that the fight had begun. The new boy tried to clinch Mealy, but the naked body slipped away from him; and just then the combatants saw the satisfied grin freeze on the faces of the boys in the water. A step crunched the gravel near them, and in a moment that flashed vividly with rejoicing that the fight was ended, then with abject, chattering terror, Mealy Jones saw his father approaching. Mealy did not run. The uplifted cane and the red, perspiring face of his father transfixed the lad, yet he felt called upon to say something. His voice came from a dry throat, and he spoke through an idiotic grin as he said, “I didn’t know you wanted me, pa.”

After the burst of his father’s anger ten awful minutes of shame passed for Mealy while he was putting on his wet clothes. The boys in the water swam noiselessly upstream to the roots of the elm-tree, where he saw them looking at his disgrace. During those ten minutes Mealy realized that his father’s deepening silence portended evil; so he tried to draw his father into a discussion of the merits of the case by whimpering from time to time, “Well, I guess they ast me to come,” or “Piggy said it wouldn’t hurt, ’cause ’t ain’t in dog days,” or “I wasn’t in where it was deep. I was only a-wadin’.” The new boy, who was seated upon a log near by with a stone in his hand, which he had picked up fearing the elder Jones would join the fray, sniffed audibly. He called to the other boys derisively, “Say, any of you boys got the baby’s blocks?” It did not lift the mantle of humiliation that covered Mealy to hear his father reply to the new boy, “That will do for you, sir.” While Mealy wept he wiped away his tears first with one hand and then with the other, employing the free hand in fastening his clothes together. He did not fear the punishment that might be in store for him. He was thinking of the agony of his next meeting with Piggy Pennington. Mealy fancied that Abe Carpenter, who was a quiet, philosophical boy, would not tease him, but horror seized him when he thought of Piggy.

As Mealy fastened his last button, he felt his father’s finger under his collar, and his own feet shambling blindly over the pebbles, up the path, into the bushes; he heard the boys in the water laugh with the new boy, and then stories differ. The boys say that he howled lustily, “Oh, pa, I won’t do it any more,” over and over again. Mealy Jones says that it didn’t hurt a bit.

This much is certain: that Master Harold Jones walked through the town that day a few feet ahead of his fathers who tapped the boy’s legs with a hooked cane whenever his steps lagged. At the door of the Jones home Mrs. Jones stood to welcome the martial procession, which she saw, and then heard, approaching some time before it arrived. To his wife, whose face pictured anxious grief, Mr. Jones said, as he turned the captive over to her: “I found this young gentleman in swimming swimming and fighting. I have attended to his immediate wants, I believe. I leave him to you.”

Harold Jones was but a lad a good lad whose knowledge of the golden text was his Sunday-school teacher’s pride. Yet he had collected other scraps of useful information as he journeyed through life. One of these was a perfectly practical familiarity with the official road map to his mother’s heart. Therefore, when he crossed the threshold of the Jones home Harold began at once to weep dolefully.

“Harold Jones, what do you mean by such conduct?” asked his mother.

The boy stood by the window long enough to see that his father had turned the corner toward the town. Then he fell on the floor, and began to bewail his lot, refusing to answer the first question his mother asked, but telling instead how “all the other boys in this town can go swimmin’ when they want to,” hinting that he wouldn’t care, if papa had only just come and brought him home, but that papa and this was followed by a vocal cataract of woe that made the dish-pans ring.

He noted that his mother bent over him and said, “My poor boy;” at which sign little Harold punctured the levees of his grief again, and said he “never was goin’ to face any of the boys in this town again” he “just couldn’t bear it.” Mrs. Jones paused in her work at this, put down a potato that she was peeling, and stood up stiffly, saying in a freezing tone, “Harold Jones, you don’t mean to tell me that your father punished you in front of those other little boys?”

Her son only sobbed and nodded an affirmative, and gave lusty voice to the tearful wish that he was dead. Mrs. Jones stooped to the floor and took her child by an arm, lifting him to his feet. She smoothed his hair and took him with her to the big chair in the dining-room, where she raised his seventy pounds to her lap, saying as she did so, “Mama’s boy will soon be too big to hold.” At that the spoiled child only renewed his weeping and clutched her tightly. There, little by little, he forgot the mishaps of the day. There the anguish lifted from his heart, and when his mother asked, “Harold, why did you go into the water when we told you not to?” the child only shook his head, and, after repeated questioning, his answer came,

“Well, they asked me, mom.”

“Who asked you?” persisted Mrs. Jones.

“Piggy Pennington and Jimmy Sears,” returned the lad.

To the query, “Well, do you have to do everything they ask you to, Harold?” the lad’s answer was a renewal of the heart-breaking sobs. These softened the mother’s heart, as many and many a woman’s heart has been melted through all the ages. She soothed the truant child and petted him, until the cramping in his throat relaxed sufficiently to admit of the passage of an astonishingly large slice of bread and butter and sugar. After it was disposed of, Harold busied himself by assorting his old iron scraps on the back porch, and his mother smiled as she fancied she heard the boy trying to whistle a tune.

Harold had left the porch before his father came home with the beefsteak for supper, and Mrs. Jones met her husband with: “Pa Jones, what could you be thinking of punishing that boy before the other children? Do you want to break what little spirit he has? Why, that child was nearly in hysterics for an hour after you left!”

Mr. Jones hung up his crooked cane, put a stick of wood in the stove, scraped his pipe with his knife, and blew through the stem.

“I guess he wasn’t hurt much,” replied the father. Then he added, as he put a live coal in the pipe: “I s’pose you went an’ babied him an’ spoiled it all.” There was a puffing pause, after which Mr. Jones added, “If you’d let him go more, an’ didn’t worry your head off when he was out of sight, he’d amount to more.”

Mrs. Jones always gave her husband three moves before she spoke. “Yes! yes! you’d make that boy a regular little rowdy if you had your way, William Jones.”

In the mean time Harold Jones had heard a long, shrill whistle in the alley, and, answering it, he ran as rapidly as his spindling legs would carry him. He knew it was the boys. They were grinning broadly when he came to them. It was Piggy Pennington who first spoke, “Oh, pa, I won’t do it any more,” repeating the phrase several times in a suppressed voice, and leering impishly at Mealy.

“Aw, you’re makin’ that up,” answered Mealy in embarrassment. But Piggy continued his teasing until Abe Carpenter said: “Say, Mealy, we want you to go to the cave with us to-morrow; can you?”

The “can you” was an imputation on his personal liberty that Mealy resented. He replied “Uh-huh! you just bet your bottom dollar I can.” Piggy began teasing again, but Abe silenced him, and the boys sat in the dirt behind the barn, chattering about the new boy, whose name, according to the others, was “Bud” Perkins. Mealy entered the conversation with much masculine pomp too much, in fact; for when he became particularly vain-glorious some one in the group was certain to glance at his shoes and shoes in June in Boyville are insignia of the weaker sex, the badges of shame.

But Mealy did not feel his disgrace. He walked up the ash path to the kitchen with an excellent imitation of manly pride in his gait. He kicked at a passing cat, and shook his head bravely, talking to himself about the way he would have whipped the new boy if his father had not interrupted the fight.

As Mrs. Jones heard the boy’s step on the porch, she said to his father, “Now, pa, that boy has been punished enough to-day. Don’t you say a word to him.” Harold walked by his father with averted face. At supper the boy did not look at his father, and when the dishes were put away, Mr. Jones, who sat in the kitchen smoking, heard his wife and the child in a front room, chatting cheerily. The lonesome father smoked his pipe and recalled his youth. The boy’s voice brought back his own shrill treble, and he coughed nervously. After Mrs. Jones had put the lad to bed, and was in the pantry arranging for breakfast, the father knocked the ashes from his briar into the stove, and, humming an old tune, went to the boy’s bedroom door. He paused awkwardly on the threshold. The boy turned his face toward the wall. The action cut the father to the quick. He walked to the bed and bent over the child, touching a father’s rough-bearded face to the soft cheek. He found the soft hand with a father’s large hand under the sheet, and he held the little hand tightly as he said:

“Well, Harold” there he paused for a second. But he continued, “Do you think you’d a-licked that boy if if I hadn’t a-come?”

Then the two laughed, and a little throb of joyous pain tingled in their throats such as only boys may feel.