Penrod Read online

  CHAPTER VIII SCHOOL

  Next morning, when he had once more resumed the dreadful burden ofeducation, it seemed infinitely duller. And yet what pleasanter sightis there than a schoolroom well filled with children of those sproutingyears just before the 'teens? The casual visitor, gazing from theteacher's platform upon these busy little heads, needs only a bluntedmemory to experience the most agreeable and exhilarating sensations.Still, for the greater part, the children are unconscious of thehappiness of their condition; for nothing is more pathetically true thanthat we "never know when we are well off." The boys in a public schoolare less aware of their happy state than are the girls; and of all theboys in his room, probably Penrod himself had the least appreciation ofhis felicity.

  He sat staring at an open page of a textbook, but not studying; not evenreading; not even thinking. Nor was he lost in a reverie: his mind's eyewas shut, as his physical eye might well have been, for the optic nerve,flaccid with ennui, conveyed nothing whatever of the printed pageupon which the orb of vision was partially focused. Penrod was doingsomething very unusual and rare, something almost never accomplishedexcept by coloured people or by a boy in school on a spring day: he wasdoing really nothing at all. He was merely a state of being.

  From the street a sound stole in through the open window, and abhorringNature began to fill the vacuum called Penrod Schofield; for the soundwas the spring song of a mouth-organ, coming down the sidewalk. Thewindows were intentionally above the level of the eyes of the seatedpupils; but the picture of the musician was plain to Penrod, painted forhim by a quality in the runs and trills, partaking of the oboe, of thecalliope, and of cats in anguish; an excruciating sweetness obtainedonly by the wallowing, walloping yellow-pink palm of a hand whose backwas Congo black and shiny. The music came down the street and passedbeneath the window, accompanied by the care-free shuffling of a pair ofold shoes scuffing syncopations on the cement sidewalk. It passed intothe distance; became faint and blurred; was gone. Emotion stirred inPenrod a great and poignant desire, but (perhaps fortunately) no fairygodmother made her appearance.

  Otherwise Penrod would have gone down the street in a black skin,playing the mouth-organ, and an unprepared coloured youth would havefound himself enjoying educational advantages for which he had noambition whatever.

  Roused from perfect apathy, the boy cast about the schoolroom an eyewearied to nausea by the perpetual vision of the neat teacher upon theplatform, the backs of the heads of the pupils in front of him, and themonotonous stretches of blackboard threateningly defaced by arithmeticalformulae and other insignia of torture. Above the blackboard, thewalls of the high room were of white plaster--white with the qualifiedwhiteness of old snow in a soft coal town. This dismal expanse wasbroken by four lithographic portraits, votive offerings of a thoughtfulpublisher. The portraits were of good and great men, kind men; menwho loved children. Their faces were noble and benevolent. But thelithographs offered the only rest for the eyes of children fatigued bythe everlasting sameness of the schoolroom. Long day after long day,interminable week in and interminable week out, vast month on vastmonth, the pupils sat with those four portraits beaming kindness downupon them. The faces became permanent in the consciousness of thechildren; they became an obsession--in and out of school the childrenwere never free of them. The four faces haunted the minds of childrenfalling asleep; they hung upon the minds of children waking at night;they rose forebodingly in the minds of children waking in the morning;they became monstrously alive in the minds of children lying sick offever. Never, while the children of that schoolroom lived, would theybe able to forget one detail of the four lithographs: the hand ofLongfellow was fixed, for them, forever, in his beard. And by a simpleand unconscious association of ideas, Penrod Schofield was accumulatingan antipathy for the gentle Longfellow and for James Russell Lowell andfor Oliver Wendell Holmes and for John Greenleaf Whittier, which wouldnever permit him to peruse a work of one of those great New Englanderswithout a feeling of personal resentment.

  His eyes fell slowly and inimically from the brow of Whittier tothe braid of reddish hair belonging to Victorine Riordan, the littleoctoroon girl who sat directly in front of him. Victorine's back was asfamiliar to Penrod as the necktie of Oliver Wendell Holmes. So was hergayly coloured plaid waist. He hated the waist as he hated Victorineherself, without knowing why. Enforced companionship in large quantitiesand on an equal basis between the sexes appears to sterilize theaffections, and schoolroom romances are few.

  Victorine's hair was thick, and the brickish glints in it werebeautiful, but Penrod was very tired of it. A tiny knot of green ribbonfinished off the braid and kept it from unravelling; and beneath theribbon there was a final wisp of hair which was just long enough torepose upon Penrod's desk when Victorine leaned back in her seat. It wasthere now. Thoughtfully, he took the braid between thumb and forefinger,and, without disturbing Victorine, dipped the end of it and the greenribbon into the inkwell of his desk. He brought hair and ribbon forthdripping purple ink, and partially dried them on a blotter, though, amoment later when Victorine leaned forward, they were still able to adda few picturesque touches to the plaid waist.

  Rudolph Krauss, across the aisle from Penrod, watched the operation withprotuberant eyes, fascinated. Inspired to imitation, he took a piece ofchalk from his pocket and wrote "RATS" across the shoulder-blades of theboy in front of him, then looked across appealingly to Penrod for tokensof congratulation. Penrod yawned. It may not be denied that at times heappeared to be a very self-centred boy.