Boy's Town

by William Dean Howells

  II.

  HOME AND KINDRED.

  AS the Boy's Town was, in one sense, merely a part of the boy, I think Ihad better tell something about my boy's family first, and theinfluences that formed his character, so that the reader can be a boywith him there on the intimate terms which are the only terms of truefriendship. His great-grandfather was a prosperous manufacturer of Welshflannels, who had founded his industry in a pretty town called The Hay,on the river Wye, in South Wales, where the boy saw one of his mills,still making Welsh flannels, when he visited his father's birthplace afew years ago. This great-grandfather was a Friend by Convincement, asthe Quakers say; that is, he was a convert, and not a born Friend, andhe had the zeal of a convert. He loved equality and fraternity, and hecame out to America towards the close of the last century to prospectfor these as well as for a good location to manufacture Welsh flannels;but after being presented to Washington, then President, atPhiladelphia, and buying a tract of land somewhere near the District ofColumbia, his phantom rolls a shadowy barrel of dollars on board ship atBaltimore, and sails back in the _Flying Dutchman_ to South Wales. Ifancy, from the tradition of the dollars, that he had made good affairshere with the stock of flannels he brought over with him; but all israther uncertain about him, especially the land he bought, though thestory of it is pretty sure to fire some descendant of his in each newgeneration with the wish to go down to Washington, and oust the peoplethere who have unrightfully squatted on the ancestral property. What isunquestionable is that this old gentleman went home and never came outhere again; but his son, who had inherited all his radicalism, sailedwith his family for Boston in 1808, when my boy's father was a year old.From Boston he passed to one Quaker neighborhood after another, in NewYork, Virginia, and Ohio, setting up the machinery of woollen mills, andfinally, after much disastrous experiment in farming, paused at theBoy's Town, and established himself in the drug and book business: drugsand books are still sold together, I believe, in small places. He hadlong ceased to be a Quaker, but he remained a Friend to every righteouscause; and brought shame to his grandson's soul by being an abolitionistin days when it was infamy to wish the slaves set free. My boy's fatherrestored his self-respect in a measure by being a Henry Clay Whig, or aconstitutional anti-slavery man. The grandfather was a ferventMethodist, but the father, after many years of scepticism, had become areceiver of the doctrines of Emanuel Swedenborg; and in this faith thechildren were brought up. It was not only their faith, but their life,and I may say that in this sense they were a very religious household,though they never went to church, because it was the Old Church. Theyhad no service of the New Church, the Swedenborgians were so few in theplace, except when some of its ministers stopped with us on theirtravels. My boy regarded these good men as all personally sacred, andwhile one of them was in the house he had some relief from the fear inwhich his days seem mostly to have been passed; as if he were for thetime being under the protection of a spiritual lightning-rod. Theirreligion was not much understood by their neighbors of the Old Church,who thought them a kind of Universalists. But the boy once heard hisfather explain to one of them that the New Church people believed in ahell, which each cast himself into if he loved the evil rather than thegood, and that no mercy could keep him out of without destroying him,for a man's love was his very self. It made his blood run cold, and heresolved that rather than cast himself into hell, he would do his poorbest to love the good. The children were taught when they teased oneanother that there was nothing the fiends so much delighted in asteasing. When they were angry and revengeful, they were told that nowthey were calling evil spirits about them, and that the good angelscould not come near them if they wished while they were in that state.My boy preferred the company of good angels after dark, and especiallyabout bedtime, and he usually made the effort to get himself into anaccessible frame of mind before he slept; by day he felt that he couldlook out for himself, and gave way to the natural man like other boys. Isuppose the children had their unwholesome spiritual pride in beingdifferent from their fellows in religion; but, on the other hand, ittaught them not to fear being different from others if they believedthemselves right. Perhaps it made my boy rather like it.

  The grandfather was of a gloomy spirit, but of a tender and lovingheart, whose usual word with a child, when he caressed it, was "Poorthing, poor thing!" as if he could only pity it; and I have no doubtthe father's religion was a true affliction to him. The children weretaken to visit their grandmother every Sunday noon, and then the fatherand grandfather never failed to have it out about the New Church and theOld. I am afraid that the father would sometimes forget his ownprecepts, and tease a little; when the mother went with him she wassometimes troubled at the warmth with which the controversy raged. Thegrandmother seemed to be bored by it, and the boys, who cared nothingfor salvation in the abstract, no matter how anxious they were about themain chance, certainly shared this feeling with her. She was a pale,little, large-eyed lady, who always wore a dress of Quakerish plainness,with a white kerchief crossed upon her breast; and her aquiline nose andjutting chin almost met. She was very good to the children and at thesetimes she usually gave them some sugar-cakes, and sent them out in theyard, where there was a young Newfoundland dog, of loose morals and noreligious ideas, who joined them in having fun, till the father came outand led them home. He would not have allowed them to play where it couldhave aggrieved any one, for a prime article of his religion was torespect the religious feelings of others, even when he thought themwrong. But he would not suffer the children to get the notion that theywere guilty of any deadly crime if they happened to come short of theconventional standard of piety. Once, when their grandfather reported tohim that the boys had been seen throwing stones on Sunday at the body ofa dog lodged on some drift in the river, he rebuked them for theindecorum, and then ended the matter, as he often did, by saying, "Boys,consider yourselves soundly thrashed."

  I should be sorry if anything I have said should give the idea thattheir behavior was either fantastic or arrogant through their religion.It was simply a pervading influence; and I am sure that in the fatherand mother it dignified life, and freighted motive and action here withthe significance of eternal fate. When the children were taught that inevery thought and in every deed they were choosing their portion withthe devils or the angels, and that God himself could not save themagainst themselves, it often went in and out of their minds, as suchthings must with children; but some impression remained and helped themto realize the serious responsibility they were under to their ownafter-selves. At the same time, the father, who loved a joke almost asmuch as he loved a truth, and who despised austerity as somethingowlish, set them the example of getting all the harmless fun they couldout of experience. They had their laugh about nearly everything that wasnot essentially sacred; they were made to feel the ludicrous as analleviation of existence; and the father and mother were with them onthe same level in all this enjoyment.

  The house was pretty full of children, big and little. There were sevenof them in the Boy's Town, and eight afterwards in all; so that if therehad been no Boy's Town about them, they would still have had a Boy'sWorld indoors. They lived in three different houses--the Thomas house,the Smith house, and the Falconer house--severally called after thenames of their owners, for they never had a house of their own. Of thefirst my boy remembered nothing, except the woodpile on which he triedhis axe, and a closet near the front door, which he entered into oneday, with his mother's leave, to pray, as the Scripture bade. It wasvery dark, and hung full of clothes, and his literal application of thetext was not edifying; he fancied, with a child's vague suspicion, thatit amused his father and mother; I dare say it also touched them. Of theSmith house, he could remember much more: the little upper room wherethe boys slept, and the narrow stairs which he often rolled down in themorning; the front room where he lay sick with a fever, and was bled bythe doctor, as people used to be in those days; the woodshed where, onedreadful afternoon, when he had somehow been left alone in th
e house, hetook it into his head that the family dog Tip was going mad; the windowwhere he traced the figure of a bull on greased paper from an engravingheld up against the light: none of them important facts, but such asstick in the mind by the capricious action of memory, while far greaterevents drop out of it. My boy's elder brother at once accused him oftracing that bull, which he pretended to have copied; but their fatherinsisted upon taking the child's word for it, though he must have knownhe was lying; and this gave my boy a far worse conscience than if hisfather had whipped him. The father's theory was that people are more aptto be true if you trust them than if you doubt them; I do not think healways found it work perfectly; but I believe he was right.

  My boy was for a long time very miserable about that bull, and theexperience taught him to desire the truth and honor it, even when hecould not attain it. Five or six years after, when his brother and hehad begun to read stories, they found one in the old _New York Mirror_which had a great influence upon their daily conduct. It was called "TheTrippings of Tom Pepper; or, the Effects of Romancing," and it showedhow at many important moments the hero had been baulked of fortune byhis habit of fibbing. They took counsel together, and pledged themselvesnot to tell the smallest lie, upon any occasion whatever. It was afrightful slavery, for there are a great many times in a boy's life whenit seems as if the truth really could not serve him. Their great trialwas having to take a younger brother with them whenever they wanted togo off with other boys; and it had been their habit to get away from himby many little deceits which they could not practise now: to tell himthat their mother wanted him; or to send him home upon some errand tohis pretended advantage that had really no object but his absence. Isuppose there is now no boy living who would do this. My boy and hisbrother groaned under their good resolution, I do not know how long; butthe day came when they could bear it no longer, though I cannot givejust the time or the terms of their backsliding. That elder brother hadbeen hard enough on my boy before the period of this awful reform: hisuprightness, his unselfishness, his truthfulness were a daily reproachto him, and it did not need this season of absolute sincerity tocomplete his wretchedness. Yet it was an experience which afterwards hewould not willingly have missed: for once in his little confused life hehad tried to practise a virtue because the opposite vice had been madeto appear foolish and mischievous to him; and not from any superstitiousfear or hope.

  As far as I can make out, he had far more fears than hopes; and perhapsevery boy has. It was in the Smith house that he began to be afraid ofghosts, though he never saw one, or anything like one. He never saweven the good genius who came down the chimney and filled the children'sstockings at Christmas. He wished to see him; but he understood that St.Nicholas was a shy spirit, and was apt to pass by the stockings of boyswho lay in wait for him. His mother had told him how the Peltsnickelused to come with a bundle of rods for the bad children when theChriskingle brought the presents of the good ones, among hisgrandmother's Pennsylvania German kindred; and he had got them allsomehow mixed up together. Then St. Nicholas, though he was so pleasantand friendly in the poem about the night before Christmas, was known tosome of the neighbor boys as Santa Claus; they called it Centre Claws,and my boy imagined him with large talons radiating from the pit of hisstomach. But this was all nothing to the notion of Dowd's spectacles,which his father sometimes joked him about, and which were representedby a pair of hollow, glassless iron rims which he had found in thestreet. They may or may not have belonged to Dowd, and Dowd may havebeen an Irishman in the neighborhood, or he may not; he may have died,or he may not; but there was something in the mere gruesome mention ofhis spectacles which related itself to all the boy had conceived of theghostly and ghastly, and all that was alarming in the supernatural; hecould never say in the least how or why. I fancy no child can everexplain just why it is affected in this way or that way by the thingsthat are or are not in the world about it; it is not easy to do this forone's self in after-life. At any rate, it is certain that my boy dweltmost of his time amid shadows that were, perhaps, projected over hisnarrow outlook from some former state of being, or from the gloomyminds of long-dead ancestors. His home was cheerful and most happy, buthe peopled all its nooks and corners with shapes of doom and horror. Theother boys were not slow to find this out, and their invention suppliedwith ready suggestion of officers and prisons any little lack of miseryhis spectres and goblins left. He often narrowly escaped arrest, orthought so, when they built a fire in the street at night, and suddenlykicked it to pieces, and shouted, "Run, run! The constable will catchyou!" Nothing but flight saved my boy, in these cases, when he wassmall. He grew bolder, after a while, concerning constables, but neverconcerning ghosts; they shivered in the autumnal evenings among the tallstalks of the corn-field that stretched, a vast wilderness, behind thehouse to the next street, and they walked the night everywhere.

  "RUN, RUN! THE CONSTABLE WILL CATCH YOU!"]

  Yet nothing more tragical, that he could remember, really happened whilehe lived in the Smith house than something he saw one bright sunnymorning, while all the boys were hanging on the fence of the next house,and watching the martins flying down to the ground from their box in thegable. The birds sent out sharp cries of terror or anger, and presentlyhe saw a black cat crouching in the grass, with half-shut eyes and anair of dreamy indifference. The birds swept down in longer and lowerloops towards the cat, drawn by some fatal charm, or by fear of thedanger that threatened their colony from the mere presence of the cat;but she did not stir. Suddenly she sprang into the air, and then dartedaway with a martin in her mouth, while my boy's heart leaped into hisown, and the other boys rushed after the cat.

  As when something dreadful happens, this seemed not to have happened;but a lovely experience leaves a sense of enduring fact behind, andremains a rich possession no matter how slight and simple it was. Myboy's mother has been dead almost a quarter of a century, but as one ofthe elder children he knew her when she was young and gay; and his lastdistinct association with the Smith house is of coming home with herafter a visit to her mother's far up the Ohio River. In their absencethe June grass, which the children's feet always kept trampled down solow, had flourished up in purple blossom, and now stood rank and tall;and the mother threw herself on her knees in it, and tossed andfrolicked with her little ones like a girl. The picture remains, and thewonder of the world in which it was true once, while all thephantasmagory of spectres has long vanished away.

  The boy could not recall the family's removal to the Falconer house.They were not there, and then they were there. It was a brick house, ata corner of the principal street, and in the gable there were places formock-windows where there had never been blinds put, but where theswallows had thickly built their nests. I dare say my boy might havebeen willing to stone these nests, but he was not allowed, either he orhis mates, who must have panted with him to improve such an opportunityof havoc. There was a real window in the gable from which he could lookout of the garret; such a garret as every boy should once have the useof some time in his life. It was dim and low, though it seemed high, andthe naked brown rafters were studded with wasps' nests; and the rainbeat on the shingles overhead. The house had been occupied by aphysician, and under the eaves the children found heaps of phials fullof doctor's stuff; the garret abounded in their own family boxes andbarrels, but there was always room for a swing, which the boys used intraining for their circuses. Below the garret there were two unimportantstories with chambers, dining-room, parlor, and so on; then you came tothe brick-paved kitchen in the basement, and a perfectly gloriouscellar, with rats in it. Outside there was a large yard, with five orsix huge old cherry-trees, and a garden plot, where every spring my boytried to make a garden, with never-failing failure.

  The house gave even to him a sense of space unknown before, and he couldrecall his mother's satisfaction in it. He has often been back there indreams, and found it on the old scale of grandeur; but no doubt it was avery simple affair. The fortunes of a Whig editor in a place
sooverwhelmingly democratic as the Boy's Town were not such as could havewarranted his living in a palace; and he must have been poor, as theworld goes now. But the family always lived in abundance, and in theirway they belonged to the employing class; that is, the father had men towork for him. On the other hand, he worked with them; and the boys, asthey grew old enough, were taught to work with them, too. My boy grewold enough very young; and was put to use in the printing-office beforehe was ten years of age. This was not altogether because he was neededthere, I dare say, but because it was part of his father's Swedenborgianphilosophy that every one should fulfil a use; I do not know that whenthe boy wanted to go swimming, or hunting, or skating, it consoled himmuch to reflect that the angels in the highest heaven delighted inuses; nevertheless, it was good for him to be of use, though maybe notso much use.

  If his mother did her own work, with help only now and then from a hiredgirl, that was the custom of the time and country; and her memory wasalways the more reverend to him, because whenever he looked back at herin those dim years, he saw her about some of those household officeswhich are so beautiful to a child. She was always the best and tenderestmother, and her love had the heavenly art of making each child feelitself the most important, while she was partial to none. In spite ofher busy days she followed their father in his religion and literature,and at night, when her long toil was over, she sat with the children andlistened while he read aloud. The first book my boy remembered to haveheard him read was Moore's "Lalla Rookh," of which he formed but a vaguenotion, though while he struggled after its meaning he took all itsmusic in, and began at once to make rhymes of his own. He had noconception of literature except the pleasure there was in making it; andhe had no outlook into the world of it, which must have been pretty opento his father. The father read aloud some of Dickens's Christmasstories, then new; and the boy had a good deal of trouble with the"Haunted Man." One rarest night of all, the family sat up till twoo'clock, listening to a novel that my boy long ago forgot the name of,if he ever knew its name. It was all about a will, forged or lost, andthere was a great scene in court, and after that the mother declaredthat she could not go to bed till she heard the end. His own firstreading was in history. At nine years of age he read the history ofGreece, and the history of Rome, and he knew that Goldsmith wrote them.One night his father told the boys all about Don Quixote; and a littlewhile after he gave my boy the book. He read it over and over again; buthe did not suppose it was a novel. It was his elder brother who readnovels, and a novel was like "Handy Andy," or "Harry Lorrequer," or the"Bride of Lammermoor." His brother had another novel which theypreferred to either; it was in Harper's old "Library of Select Novels,"and was called "Alamance; or, the Great and Final Experiment," and itwas about the life of some sort of community in North Carolina. Itbewitched them, and though my boy could not afterwards recall a singlefact or figure in it, he could bring before his mind's eye every traitof its outward aspect. It was at this time that his father bought anEnglish-Spanish grammar from a returned volunteer, who had picked it upin the city of Mexico, and gave it to the boy. He must have expected himto learn Spanish from it; but the boy did not know even the parts ofspeech in English. As the father had once taught English grammar in sixlessons, from a broadside of his own authorship, he may have expectedthe principle of heredity to help the boy; and certainly he did dig theEnglish grammar out of that blessed book, and the Spanish language withit, but after many long years, and much despair over the differencebetween a preposition and a substantive.

  All this went along with great and continued political excitement, andwith some glimpses of the social problem. It was very simple then;nobody was very rich, and nobody was in want; but somehow, as the boygrew older, he began to discover that there were differences, even inthe little world about him; some were higher and some were lower. Fromthe first he was taught by precept and example to take the side of thelower. As the children were denied oftener than they were indulged, themargin of their own abundance must have been narrower than they everknew then; but if they had been of the most prosperous, their bent inthis matter would have been the same. Once there was a church festival,or something of that sort, and there was a good deal of the provisionleft over, which it was decided should be given to the poor. This wasvery easy, but it was not so easy to find the poor whom it should begiven to. At last a hard-working widow was chosen to receive it; theladies carried it to her front door and gave it her, and she carried itto her back door and threw it into the alley. No doubt she had enoughwithout it, but there were circumstances of indignity or patronageattending the gift which were recognized in my boy's home, and whichhelped afterwards to make him doubtful of all giving, except thehumblest, and restive with a world in which there need be any giving atall.