The footlights were aided by a "spot-light" from the rear of the hall; and the children were revealed in a blaze of glory.
A hushed, mult.i.tudinous "O-OH" of admiration came from the decorous and delighted audience. Then the children sang feebly:
"Chuldrun of the Tabul Round, Lit-tul knights and ladies we.
Let our voy-siz all resound Faith and hope and charitee!"
The Child King Arthur rose, extended his sceptre with the decisive gesture of a semaph.o.r.e, and spake:
"Each littul knight and lady born Has n.o.ble deeds TO perform In THEE child-world of shivullree, No matter how small his share may be.
Let each advance and tell in turn What claim has each to knighthood earn."
The Child Sir Mordred, the villain of this piece, rose in his place at the table round, and piped the only lines ever written by Mrs. Lora Rewbush which Penrod Schofield could have p.r.o.nounced without loathing.
Georgie Ba.s.sett, a really angelic boy, had been selected for the role of Mordred. His perfect conduct had earned for him the sardonic sobriquet, "The Little Gentleman," among his boy acquaintances. (Naturally he had no friends.) Hence the other boys supposed that he had been selected for the wicked Mordred as a reward of virtue. He declaimed serenely:
"I hight Sir Mordred the Child, and I teach Lessons of selfishest evil, and reach Out into darkness. Thoughtless, unkind, And ruthless is Mordred, and unrefined."
The Child Mordred was properly rebuked and denied the accolade, though, like the others, he seemed to have a.s.sumed the t.i.tle already. He made a plotter"s exit. Whereupon Maurice Levy rose, bowed, announced that he highted the Child Sir Galahad, and continued with perfect sang-froid:
"I am the purest of the pure.
I have but kindest thoughts each day.
I give my riches to the poor, And follow in the Master"s way."
This elicited tokens of approval from the Child King Arthur, and he bade Maurice "stand forth" and come near the throne, a command obeyed with the easy grace of conscious merit.
It was Penrod"s turn. He stepped back from his chair, the table between him and the audience, and began in a high, breathless monotone:
"I hight Sir Lancelot du Lake, the Child, Gentul-hearted, meek, and mild.
What though I"m BUT a littul child, Gentul-heartud, meek, and mild, I do my share though but--though but----"
Penrod paused and gulped. The voice of Mrs. Lora Rewbush was heard from the wings, prompting irritably, and the Child. Sir Lancelot repeated:
"I do my share though but--though but a tot, I pray you knight Sir Lancelot!"
This also met the royal favour, and Penrod was bidden to join Sir Galahad at the throne. As he crossed the stage, Mrs. Schofield whispered to Margaret:
"That boy! He"s unpinned his mantle and fixed it to cover his whole costume. After we worked so hard to make it becoming!"
"Never mind; he"ll have to take the cape off in a minute," returned Margaret. She leaned forward suddenly, narrowing her eyes to see better. "What IS that thing hanging about his left ankle?" she whispered uneasily. "How queer! He must have got tangled in something."
"Where?" asked Mrs. Schofield, in alarm.
"His left foot. It makes him stumble. Don"t you see? It looks--it looks like an elephant"s foot!"
The Child Sir Lancelot and the Child Sir Galahad clasped hands before their Child King. Penrod was conscious of a great uplift; in a moment he would have to throw aside his mantle, but even so he was protected and sheltered in the human garment of a man. His stage-fright had pa.s.sed, for the audience was but an indistinguishable blur of darkness beyond the dazzling lights. His most repulsive speech (that in which he proclaimed himself a "tot") was over and done with; and now at last the small, moist hand of the Child Sir Galahad lay within his own. Craftily his brown fingers stole from Maurice"s palm to the wrist. The two boys declaimed in concert:
"We are two chuldrun of the Tabul Round Strewing kindness all a-round.
With love and good deeds striving ever for the best, May our littul efforts e"er be blest.
Two littul hearts we offer. See United in love, faith, hope, and char--OW!"
The conclusion of the duet was marred. The Child Sir Galahad suddenly stiffened, and, uttering an irrepressible shriek of anguish, gave a brief exhibition of the contortionist"s art. ("HE"S TWISTIN" MY WRIST!
DERN YOU, LEGGO!")
The voice of Mrs. Lora Rewbush was again heard from the wings; it sounded bloodthirsty. Penrod released his victim; and the Child King Arthur, somewhat disconcerted, extended his sceptre and, with the a.s.sistance of the enraged prompter, said:
"Sweet child-friends of the Tabul Round, In brotherly love and kindness abound, Sir Lancelot, you have spoken well, Sir Galahad, too, as clear as bell.
So now pray doff your mantles gay.
You shall be knighted this very day."
And Penrod doffed his mantle.
Simultaneously, a thick and vasty gasp came from the audience, as from five hundred bathers in a wholly unexpected surf. This gasp was punctuated irregularly, over the auditorium, by imperfectly subdued screams both of dismay and incredulous joy, and by two dismal shrieks.
Altogether it was an extraordinary sound, a sound never to be forgotten by any one who heard it. It was almost as unforgettable as the sight which caused it; the word "sight" being here used in its vernacular sense, for Penrod, standing unmantled and revealed in all the medieval and artistic glory of the janitor"s blue overalls, falls within its meaning.
The janitor was a heavy man, and his overalls, upon Penrod, were merely oceanic. The boy was at once swaddled and lost within their blue gulfs and vast saggings; and the left leg, too hastily rolled up, had descended with a distinctively elephantine effect, as Margaret had observed. Certainly, the Child Sir Lancelot was at least a sight.
It is probable that a great many in that hall must have had, even then, a consciousness that they were looking on at History in the Making.
A supreme act is recognizable at sight: it bears the birthmark of immortality. But Penrod, that marvellous boy, had begun to declaim, even with the gesture of flinging off his mantle for the accolade:
"I first, the Child Sir Lancelot du Lake, Will volunteer to knighthood take, And kneeling here before your throne I vow to----"
He finished his speech unheard. The audience had recovered breath, but had lost self-control, and there ensued something later described by a partic.i.p.ant as a sort of cultured riot.
The actors in the "pageant" were not so dumfounded by Penrod"s costume as might have been expected. A few precocious geniuses perceived that the overalls were the Child Lancelot"s own comment on maternal intentions; and these were profoundly impressed: they regarded him with the grisly admiration of young and ambitious criminals for a jail-mate about to be distinguished by hanging. But most of the children simply took it to be the case (a little strange, but not startling) that Penrod"s mother had dressed him like that--which is pathetic. They tried to go on with the "pageant."
They made a brief, manful effort. But the irrepressible outbursts from the audience bewildered them; every time Sir Lancelot du Lake the Child opened his mouth, the great, shadowy house fell into an uproar, and the children into confusion. Strong women and brave girls in the audience went out into the lobby, shrieking and clinging to one another. Others remained, rocking in their seats, helpless and spent. The neighbourhood of Mrs. Schofield and Margaret became, tactfully, a desert. Friends of the author went behind the scenes and encountered a hitherto unknown phase of Mrs. Lora Rewbush; they said, afterward, that she hardly seemed to know what she was doing. She begged to be left alone somewhere with Penrod Schofield, for just a little while.
They led her away.
CHAPTER VI EVENING
The sun was setting behind the back fence (though at a considerable distance) as Penrod Schofield approached that fence and looked thoughtfully up at the top of it, apparently having in mind some purpose to climb up and sit there. Debating this, he pa.s.sed his fingers gently up and down the backs of his legs; and then something seemed to decide him not to sit anywhere. He leaned against the fence, sighed profoundly, and gazed at Duke, his wistful dog.
The sigh was reminiscent: episodes of simple pathos were pa.s.sing before his inward eye. About the most painful was the vision of lovely Marjorie Jones, weeping with rage as the Child Sir Lancelot was dragged, insatiate, from the prostrate and howling Child Sir Galahad, after an onslaught delivered the precise instant the curtain began to fall upon the demoralized "pageant." And then--oh, pangs! oh, woman!--she slapped at the ruffian"s cheek, as he was led past her by a resentful janitor; and turning, flung her arms round the Child Sir Galahad"s neck.
"PENROD SCHOFIELD, DON"T YOU DARE EVER SPEAK TO ME AGAIN AS LONG AS YOU LIVE!" Maurice"s little white boots and gold ta.s.sels had done their work.
At home the late Child Sir Lancelot was consigned to a locked clothes-closet pending the arrival of his father. Mr. Schofield came and, shortly after, there was put into practice an old patriarchal custom. It is a custom of inconceivable antiquity: probably primordial, certainly prehistoric, but still in vogue in some remaining citadels of the ancient simplicities of the Republic.
And now, therefore, in the dusk, Penrod leaned against the fence and sighed.
His case is comparable to that of an adult who could have survived a similar experience. Looking back to the sawdust-box, fancy pictures this comparable adult a serious and inventive writer engaged in congenial literary activities in a private retreat. We see this period marked by the creation of some of the most virile pa.s.sages of a Work dealing exclusively in red corpuscles and huge primal impulses. We see this thoughtful man dragged from his calm seclusion to a horrifying publicity; forced to adopt the stage and, himself a writer, compelled to exploit the repulsive sentiments of an author not only personally distasteful to him but whose whole method and school in belles lettres he despises.
We see him reduced by desperation and modesty to stealing a pair of overalls. We conceive him to have ruined, then, his own reputation, and to have utterly disgraced his family; next, to have engaged in the duello and to have been spurned by his lady-love, thus lost to him (according to her own declaration) forever. Finally, we must behold: imprisonment by the authorities; the third degree and flagellation.
We conceive our man decided that his career had been perhaps too eventful. Yet Penrod had condensed all of it into eight hours.
It appears that he had at least some shadowy perception of a recent fulness of life, for, as he leaned against the fence, gazing upon his wistful Duke, he sighed again and murmured aloud: