Penrod Page 3

  CHAPTER III THE COSTUME

  After lunch his mother and his sister Margaret, a pretty girl ofnineteen, dressed him for the sacrifice. They stood him near hismother's bedroom window and did what they would to him.

  During the earlier anguishes of the process he was mute, exceeding thepathos of the stricken calf in the shambles; but a student of eyesmight have perceived in his soul the premonitory symptoms of a sinisteruprising. At a rehearsal (in citizens' clothes) attended by mothers andgrown-up sisters, Mrs. Lora Rewbush had announced that she wished thecostuming to be "as medieval and artistic as possible." Otherwise, andas to details, she said, she would leave the costumes entirely to thegood taste of the children's parents. Mrs. Schofield and Margaret wereno archeologists, but they knew that their taste was as good as that ofother mothers and sisters concerned; so with perfect confidence they hadplanned and executed a costume for Penrod; and the only misgiving theyfelt was connected with the tractability of the Child Sir Lancelothimself.

  Stripped to his underwear, he had been made to wash himself vehemently;then they began by shrouding his legs in a pair of silk stockings, onceblue but now mostly whitish. Upon Penrod they visibly surpassed mereampleness; but they were long, and it required only a rather looseimagination to assume that they were tights.

  The upper part of his body was next concealed from view by a garmentso peculiar that its description becomes difficult. In 1886, Mrs.Schofield, then unmarried, had worn at her "coming-out party" a dress ofvivid salmon silk which had been remodelled after her marriage to accordwith various epochs of fashion until a final, unskilful campaign at adye-house had left it in a condition certain to attract much attentionto the wearer. Mrs. Schofield had considered giving it to Della, thecook; but had decided not to do so, because you never could tell howDella was going to take things, and cooks were scarce.

  It may have been the word "medieval" (in Mrs. Lora Rewbush's richphrase) which had inspired the idea for a last conspicuous usefulness;at all events, the bodice of that once salmon dress, somewhat modifiedand moderated, now took a position, for its farewell appearance insociety, upon the back, breast, and arms of the Child Sir Lancelot.

  The area thus costumed ceased at the waist, leaving a Jaeger-like andunmedieval gap thence to the tops of the stockings. The inventive geniusof woman triumphantly bridged it, but in a manner which imposes uponhistory almost insuperable delicacies of narration. Penrod's fatherwas an old-fashioned man: the twentieth century had failed to shake hisfaith in red flannel for cold weather; and it was while Mrs. Schofieldwas putting away her husband's winter underwear that she perceived howhopelessly one of the elder specimens had dwindled; and simultaneouslyshe received the inspiration which resulted in a pair of trunks for theChild Sir Lancelot, and added an earnest bit of colour, as well as agenuine touch of the Middle Ages, to his costume. Reversed, fore to aft,with the greater part of the legs cut off, and strips of silver braidcovering the seams, this garment, she felt, was not traceable to itsoriginal source.

  When it had been placed upon Penrod, the stockings were attached to itby a system of safety-pins, not very perceptible at a distance. Next,after being severely warned against stooping, Penrod got his feet intothe slippers he wore to dancing-school--"patent-leather pumps" nowdecorated with large pink rosettes.

  "If I can't stoop," he began, smolderingly, "I'd like to know how'm Igoin' to kneel in the pag----"

  "You must MANAGE!" This, uttered through pins, was evidently thought tobe sufficient.

  They fastened some ruching about his slender neck, pinned ribbons atrandom all over him, and then Margaret thickly powdered his hair.

  "Oh, yes, that's all right," she said, replying to a question put by hermother. "They always powdered their hair in Colonial times."

  "It doesn't seem right to me--exactly," objected Mrs. Schofield, gently."Sir Lancelot must have been ever so long before Colonial times."

  "That doesn't matter," Margaret reassured her. "Nobody'll know thedifference--Mrs. Lora Rewbush least of all. I don't think she knows athing about it, though, of course, she does write splendidly and thewords of the pageant are just beautiful. Stand still, Penrod!" (Theauthor of "Harold Ramorez" had moved convulsively.) "Besides, powderedhair's always becoming. Look at him. You'd hardly know it was Penrod!"

  The pride and admiration with which she pronounced this undeniable truthmight have been thought tactless, but Penrod, not analytical, found hisspirits somewhat elevated. No mirror was in his range of vision and,though he had submitted to cursory measurements of his person a weekearlier, he had no previous acquaintance with the costume. He beganto form a not unpleasing mental picture of his appearance, somethingsomewhere between the portraits of George Washington and a vivid memoryof Miss Julia Marlowe at a matinee of "Twelfth Night."

  He was additionally cheered by a sword which had been borrowed from aneighbor, who was a Knight of Pythias. Finally there was a mantle, anold golf cape of Margaret's. Fluffy polka-dots of white cotton had beensewed to it generously; also it was ornamented with a large cross ofred flannel, suggested by the picture of a Crusader in a newspaperadvertisement. The mantle was fastened to Penrod's shoulder (that is,to the shoulder of Mrs. Schofield's ex-bodice) by means of largesafety-pins, and arranged to hang down behind him, touching his heels,but obscuring nowise the glory of his facade. Then, at last, he wasallowed to step before a mirror.

  It was a full-length glass, and the worst immediately happened. It mighthave been a little less violent, perhaps, if Penrod's expectations hadnot been so richly and poetically idealized; but as things were, therevolt was volcanic.

  Victor Hugo's account of the fight with the devil-fish, in "Toilersof the Sea," encourages a belief that, had Hugo lived and increased inpower, he might have been equal to a proper recital of the halfhour which followed Penrod's first sight of himself as the Child SirLancelot. But Mr. Wilson himself, dastard but eloquent foe of HaroldRamorez, could not have expressed, with all the vile dashes athis command, the sentiments which animated Penrod's bosom when theinstantaneous and unalterable conviction descended upon him that he wasintended by his loved ones to make a public spectacle of himself in hissister's stockings and part of an old dress of his mother's.

  To him these familiar things were not disguised at all; there seemed nopossibility that the whole world would not know them at a glance. Thestockings were worse than the bodice. He had been assured that thesecould not be recognized, but, seeing them in the mirror, he was surethat no human eye could fail at first glance to detect the differencebetween himself and the former purposes of these stockings. Fold,wrinkle, and void shrieked their history with a hundred tongues,invoking earthquake, eclipse, and blue ruin. The frantic youth's finalsubmission was obtained only after a painful telephonic conversationbetween himself and his father, the latter having been called up andupon, by the exhausted Mrs. Schofield, to subjugate his offspring bywire.

  The two ladies made all possible haste, after this, to deliverPenrod into the hands of Mrs. Lora Rewbush; nevertheless, they foundopportunity to exchange earnest congratulations upon his not havingrecognized the humble but serviceable paternal garment now brilliantabout the Lancelotish middle. Altogether, they felt that the costumewas a success. Penrod looked like nothing ever remotely imagined bySir Thomas Malory or Alfred Tennyson;--for that matter, he looked likenothing ever before seen on earth; but as Mrs. Schofield and Margarettook their places in the audience at the Women's Arts and Guild Hall,the anxiety they felt concerning Penrod's elocutionary and gesticularpowers, so soon to be put to public test, was pleasantly tempered bytheir satisfaction that, owing to their efforts, his outward appearancewould be a credit to the family.