“Penrod,” his mother exclaimed, losing patience, “I’ll call your papa to make you take it, if you don’t swallow it right down! Open your mouth, Penrod! It isn’t going to taste bad at all. Open your mouth — THERE!”
The reluctant jaw relaxed at last, and Mrs. Schofield dexterously elevated the handle of the spoon so that the brown liquor was deposited within her son.
“There!” she repeated triumphantly. “It wasn’t so bad after all, was it?”
Penrod did not reply. His expression had become odd, and the oddity of his manner was equal to that of his expression. Uttering no sound, he seemed to distend, as if he had suddenly become a pneumatic boy under dangerous pressure. Meanwhile, his reddening eyes, fixed awfully upon his mother, grew unbearable.
“Now, it wasn’t such a bad taste,” Mrs. Schofield said rather nervously. “Don’t go acting THAT way, Penrod!”
But Penrod could not help himself. In truth, even a grown person hardened to all manner of flavours, and able to eat caviar or liquid Camembert, would have found the cloudy brown liquor virulently repulsive. It contained in solution, with other things, the vital element of surprise, for it was comparatively odourless, and, unlike the chivalrous rattlesnake, gave no warning of what it was about to do. In the case of Penrod, the surprise was complete and its effect visibly shocking.
The distention by which he began to express his emotion appeared to be increasing; his slender throat swelled as his cheeks puffed. His shoulders rose toward his ears; he lifted his right leg in an unnatural way and held it rigidly in the air.
“Stop that, Penrod!” Mrs. Schofield commanded. “You stop it!”
He found his voice.
“Uff! OOOFF!” he said thickly, and collapsed — a mere, ordinary, every-day convulsion taking the place of his pneumatic symptoms. He began to writhe, at the same time opening and closing his mouth rapidly and repeatedly, waving his arms, stamping on the floor.
“Ow! Ow-ow-OW!” he vociferated.
Reassured by these normal demonstrations, of a type with which she was familiar, Mrs. Schofield resumed her fond smile.
“YOU’RE all right, little boysie!” she said heartily. Then, picking up the bottle, she replenished the tablespoon, and told Penrod something she had considered it undiplomatic to mention before.
“Here’s the other one,” she said sweetly.
“Uuf!” he sputtered. “Other — uh — what?”
“Two tablespoons before each meal,” she informed him.
Instantly Penrod made the first of a series of passionate efforts to leave the room. His determination was so intense and the manifestations of it were so ruthless, that Mrs. Schofield, exhausted, found herself obliged to call for the official head of the house — in fact, she found herself obliged to shriek for him; and Mr. Schofield, hastily entering the room, beheld his wife apparently in the act of sawing his son back and forth across the sill of an open window.
Penrod made a frantic effort to reach the good green earth, even after his mother’s clutch upon his ankle had been reenforced by his father’s. Nor was the lad’s revolt subdued when he was deposited upon the floor and the window closed. Indeed, it may be said that he actually never gave up, though it is a fact that the second potion was successfully placed inside him. But by the time this feat was finally accomplished, Mr. Schofield had proved that, in spite of middle age, he was entitled to substantial claims and honours both as athlete and orator — his oratory being founded less upon the school of Webster and more upon that of Jeremiah.
So the thing was done, and the double dose put within the person of Penrod Schofield. It proved not ineffective there, and presently, as its new owner sat morosely at table, he began to feel slightly dizzy and his eyes refused him perfect service. This was natural, because two tablespoons of the cloudy brown liquor contained about the amount of alcohol to be found in an ordinary cocktail. Now a boy does not enjoy the effects of intoxication; enjoyment of that kind is obtained only by studious application. Therefore, Penrod spoke of his symptoms complainingly, and even showed himself so vindictive as to attribute them to the new medicine.
His mother made no reply. Instead, she nodded her head as if some inner conviction had proven well founded.
“BILIOUS, TOO,” she whispered to her husband.
That evening, during the half-hour preceding dinner, the dining-room was the scene of another struggle, only a little less desperate than that which had been the prelude to lunch, and again an appeal to the head of the house was found necessary. Muscular activity and a liberal imitation of the jeremiads once more subjugated the rebel — and the same rebellion and its suppression in a like manner took place the following morning before breakfast. But this was Saturday, and, without warning or apparent reason, a remarkable change came about at noon. However, Mr. and Mrs. Schofield were used to inexplicable changes in Penrod, and they missed its significance.
When Mrs. Schofield, with dread in her heart, called Penrod into the house “to take his medicine” before lunch, he came briskly, and took it like a lamb!
“Why, Penrod, that’s splendid!” she cried “You see it isn’t bad, at all.”
“No’m,” he said meekly. “Not when you get used to it.”
“And aren’t you ashamed, making all that fuss?” she went on happily.
“Yes’m, I guess so.”
“And don’t you feel better? Don’t you see how much good it’s doing you already?”
“Yes’m, I guess so.”
Upon a holiday morning, several weeks later, Penrod and Sam Williams revived a pastime that they called “drug store”, setting up display counters, selling chemical, cosmetic and other compounds to imaginary customers, filling prescriptions and variously conducting themselves in a pharmaceutical manner. They were in the midst of affairs when Penrod interrupted his partner and himself with a cry of recollection.
“I know!” he shouted. “I got some mighty good ole stuff we want. You wait!” And, dashing to the house, he disappeared.
Returning immediately, Penrod placed upon the principal counter of the “drug store” a large bottle. It was a quart bottle, in fact; and it contained what appeared to be a section of grassy swamp immersed in a cloudy brown liquor.
“There!” Penrod exclaimed. “How’s that for some good ole medicine?”
“It’s good ole stuff,” Sam said approvingly. “Where’d you get it? Whose is it, Penrod?”
“It WAS mine,” said Penrod. “Up to about serreval days ago, it was. They quit givin’ it to me. I had to take two bottles and a half of it.”
“What did you haf to take it for?”
“I got nervous, or sumpthing,” said Penrod.
“You all well again now?”
“I guess so. Uncle Passloe and cousin Ronald came to visit, and I expect she got too busy to think about it, or sumpthing. Anyway, she quit makin’ me take it, and said I was lots better. She’s forgot all about it by this time.”
Sam was looking at the bottle with great interest.
“What’s all that stuff in there, Penrod?” he asked. “What’s all that stuff in there looks like grass?”
“It IS grass,” said Penrod.
“How’d it get there?”
“I stuck it in there,” the candid boy replied. “First they had some horrable ole stuff in there like to killed me. But after they got three doses down me, I took the bottle out in the yard and cleaned her all out and pulled a lot o’ good ole grass and stuffed her pretty full and poured in a lot o’ good ole hydrant water on top of it. Then, when they got the next bottle, I did the same way, and—”
“It don’t look like water,” Sam objected.
Penrod laughed a superior laugh.
“Oh, that’s nothin’,” he said, with the slight swagger of young and conscious genius. “Of course, I had to slip in and shake her up sometimes, so’s they wouldn’t notice.”
“But what did you put in it to make it look like that?”
Penrod, upon
the point of replying, happened to glance toward the house. His gaze, lifting, rested for a moment upon a window. The head of Mrs. Schofield was framed in that window. She nodded gayly to her son. She could see him plainly, and she thought that he seemed perfectly healthy, and as happy as a boy could be. She was right.
“What DID you put in it?” Sam insisted.
And probably it was just as well that, though Mrs. Schofield could see her son, the distance was too great for her to hear him.
“Oh, nothin’,” Penrod replied. “Nothin’ but a little good ole mud.”
CHAPTER XII. GIPSY
ON A FAIR Saturday afternoon in November Penrod’s little old dog Duke returned to the ways of his youth and had trouble with a strange cat on the back porch. This indiscretion, so uncharacteristic, was due to the agitation of a surprised moment, for Duke’s experience had inclined him to a peaceful pessimism, and he had no ambition for hazardous undertakings of any sort. He was given to musing but not to avoidable action, and he seemed habitually to hope for something that he was pretty sure would not happen. Even in his sleep, this gave him an air of wistfulness.
Thus, being asleep in a nook behind the metal refuse-can, when the strange cat ventured to ascend the steps of the porch, his appearance was so unwarlike that the cat felt encouraged to extend its field of reconnaissance for the cook had been careless, and the backbone of a three-pound whitefish lay at the foot of the refuse-can.
This cat was, for a cat, needlessly tall, powerful, independent and masculine. Once, long ago, he had been a roly-poly pepper-and-salt kitten; he had a home in those days, and a name, “Gipsy,” which he abundantly justified. He was precocious in dissipation. Long before his adolescence, his lack of domesticity was ominous, and he had formed bad companionships. Meanwhile, he grew so rangy, and developed such length and power of leg and such traits of character, that the father of the little girl who owned him was almost convincing when he declared that the young cat was half broncho and half Malay pirate — though, in the light of Gipsy’s later career, this seems bitterly unfair to even the lowest orders of bronchos and Malay pirates.
No; Gipsy was not the pet for a little girl. The rosy hearthstone and sheltered rug were too circumspect for him. Surrounded by the comforts of middle-class respectability, and profoundly oppressed, even in his youth, by the Puritan ideals of the household, he sometimes experienced a sense of suffocation. He wanted free air and he wanted free life; he wanted the lights, the lights and the music. He abandoned the bourgeoise irrevocably. He went forth in a May twilight, carrying the evening beefsteak with him, and joined the underworld.
His extraordinary size, his daring and his utter lack of sympathy soon made him the leader — and, at the same time, the terror — of all the loose-lived cats in a wide neighbourhood. He contracted no friendships and had no confidants. He seldom slept in the same place twice in succession, and though he was wanted by the police, he was not found. In appearance he did not lack distinction of an ominous sort; the slow, rhythmic, perfectly controlled mechanism of his tail, as he impressively walked abroad, was incomparably sinister. This stately and dangerous walk of his, his long, vibrant whiskers, his scars, his yellow eye, so ice-cold, so fire-hot, haughty as the eye of Satan, gave him the deadly air of a mousquetaire duellist. His soul was in that walk and in that eye; it could be read — the soul of a bravo of fortune, living on his wits and his velour, asking no favours and granting no quarter. Intolerant, proud, sullen, yet watchful and constantly planning — purely a militarist, believing in slaughter as in a religion, and confident that art, science, poetry and the good of the world were happily advanced thereby — Gipsy had become, though technically not a wildcat, undoubtedly the most untamed cat at large in the civilized world. Such, in brief, was the terrifying creature that now elongated its neck, and, over the top step of the porch, bent a calculating scrutiny upon the wistful and slumberous Duke.
The scrutiny was searching but not prolonged. Gipsy muttered contemptuously to himself, “Oh, sheol; I’m not afraid o’ THAT!” And he approached the fishbone, his padded feet making no noise upon the boards. It was a desirable fishbone, large, with a considerable portion of the fish’s tail still attached to it.
It was about a foot from Duke’s nose, and the little dog’s dreams began to be troubled by his olfactory nerve. This faithful sentinel, on guard even while Duke slept, signalled that alarums and excursions by parties unknown were taking place, and suggested that attention might well be paid. Duke opened one drowsy eye. What that eye beheld was monstrous.
Here was a strange experience — the horrific vision in the midst of things so accustomed. Sunshine fell sweetly upon porch and backyard; yonder was the familiar stable, and from its interior came the busy hum of a carpenter shop, established that morning by Duke’s young master, in association with Samuel Williams and Herman. Here, close by, were the quiet refuse-can and the wonted brooms and mops leaning against the latticed wall at the end of the porch, and there, by the foot of the steps, was the stone slab of the cistern, with the iron cover displaced and lying beside the round opening, where the carpenters had left it, not half an hour ago, after lowering a stick of wood into the water, “to season it”. All about Duke were these usual and reassuring environs of his daily life, and yet it was his fate to behold, right in the midst of them, and in ghastly juxtaposition to his face, a thing of nightmare and lunacy.
Gipsy had seized the fishbone by the middle. Out from one side of his head, and mingling with his whiskers, projected the long, spiked spine of the big fish; down from the other side of that ferocious head dangled the fish’s tail, and from above the remarkable effect thus produced shot the intolerable glare of two yellow eyes. To the gaze of Duke, still blurred by slumber, this monstrosity was all of one piece the bone seemed a living part of it. What he saw was like those interesting insect-faces that the magnifying glass reveals to great M. Fabre. It was impossible for Duke to maintain the philosophic calm of M. Fabre, however; there was no magnifying glass between him and this spined and spiky face. Indeed, Duke was not in a position to think the matter over quietly. If he had been able to do that, he would have said to himself: “We have here an animal of most peculiar and unattractive appearance, though, upon examination, it seems to be only a cat stealing a fishbone. Nevertheless, as the thief is large beyond all my recollection of cats and has an unpleasant stare, I will leave this spot at once.”
On the contrary, Duke was so electrified by his horrid awakening that he completely lost his presence of mind. In the very instant of his first eye’s opening, the other eye and his mouth behaved similarly, the latter loosing upon the quiet air one shriek of mental agony before the little dog scrambled to his feet and gave further employment to his voice in a frenzy of profanity. At the same time the subterranean diapason of a demoniac bass viol was heard; it rose to a wail, and rose and rose again till it screamed like a small siren. It was Gipsy’s war-cry, and, at the sound of it, Duke became a frothing maniac. He made a convulsive frontal attack upon the hobgoblin — and the massacre began.
Never releasing the fishbone for an instant, Gipsy laid back his ears in a chilling way, beginning to shrink into himself like a concertina, but rising amidships so high that he appeared to be giving an imitation of that peaceful beast, the dromedary. Such was not his purpose, however, for, having attained his greatest possible altitude, he partially sat down and elevated his right arm after the manner of a semaphore. This semaphore arm remained rigid for a second, threatening; then it vibrated with inconceivable rapidity, feinting. But it was the treacherous left that did the work. Seemingly this left gave Duke three lightning little pats upon the right ear; but the change in his voice indicated that these were no love-taps. He yelled “help!” and “bloody murder!”
Never had such a shattering uproar, all vocal, broken out upon a peaceful afternoon. Gipsy possessed a vocabulary for cat-swearing certainly second to none out of Italy, and probably equal to the best there, while Duke remembered and u
ttered things he had not thought of for years.
The hum of the carpenter shop ceased, and Sam Williams appeared in the stable doorway. He stared insanely.
“My gorry!” he shouted. “Duke’s havin’ a fight with the biggest cat you ever saw in your life! C’mon!”
His feet were already in motion toward the battlefield, with Penrod and Herman hurrying in his wake. Onward they sped, and Duke was encouraged by the sight and sound of these reenforcements to increase his own outrageous clamours and to press home his attack. But he was ill-advised. This time it was the right arm of the semaphore that dipped — and Duke’s honest nose was but too conscious of what happened in consequence.
A lump of dirt struck the refuse-can with violence, and Gipsy beheld the advance of overwhelming forces. They rushed upon him from two directions, cutting off the steps of the porch. Undaunted, the formidable cat raked Duke’s nose again, somewhat more lingeringly, and prepared to depart with his fishbone. He had little fear for himself, because he was inclined to think that, unhampered, he could whip anything on earth; still, things seemed to be growing rather warm and he saw nothing to prevent his leaving.
And though he could laugh in the face of so unequal an antagonist as Duke, Gipsy felt that he was never at his best or able to do himself full justice unless he could perform that feline operation inaccurately known as “spitting”. To his notion, this was an absolute essential to combat; but, as all cats of the slightest pretensions to technique perfectly understand, it can neither be well done nor produce the best effects unless the mouth be opened to its utmost capacity so as to expose the beginnings of the alimentary canal, down which — at least that is the intention of the threat — the opposing party will soon be passing. And Gipsy could not open his mouth without relinquishing his fishbone.
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 196