Penguin Persons & Peppermints Part 14

Old Hundred rose and dusted his clothes. "Here," I cried. "You're not done yet!"

"Oh, yes I am!" he answered.

"Quitter, quitter, quitter!" I taunted.

"That may be," said he, "but a learned lawyer of forty-five with a dirty mug is rather more self-conscious than a boy of ten. I'll buy you a dinner when we get to town."

"Oh, very well," said I, peevishly, "but I didn't think you'd so degenerated. I'll let you off if you'll admit it was stick-knife."

"I'll admit it," said Old Hundred. "I suppose in a minute you'll ask me to admit that prisoners'-base was relievo."

"What _was_ relievo, by the way?" I asked.

"Relievo--relievo?" said Old Hundred. "Why that was a game we played mostly on the ice, up on Birch Meadow, don't you remember? When we got tired of hockey, we all put our coats and hockey sticks in a pile, one man was It, and the rest tried to skate from a distant line around the pile and back. It the chap who was It tagged anybody before he got around, that chap had to be It with him, and so on till everybody was caught. Then the first one tagged had to be It for a new start."

"I remember that game," said I. "I remember how Frank White, who could skate like a fiend, used to be the last one caught. Sometimes he'd get around a hundred boys, ducking and dodging and taking half a mile of ice to do it, but escaping untouched. Sometimes, if there weren't many playing, he'd go around backwards, just to taunt us. But I don't think that game was relievo. That doesn't sound like the name to me."

"What was it, then?" said Old Hundred.

"I don't know," I answered. "It's funny how you forget things."

By this time we were strolling along the road again. "Speaking of Birch Meadow," said Old Hundred, "what glorious skating we kids used to have there! I never go by Central Park in winter without pitying the poor New York youngsters, just hobbling round and round on a half-acre pond where the surface is cut up into powder an inch thick, and the crowd is so dense you can scarcely see the ice. Shall you ever forget that mile-long pond in the woods, not deep enough to drown in anywhere, and frozen over with smooth black ice as early as Thanksgiving Day? How we used to rush to it, up Love Lane, as soon as school was out!"

"Do you remember," said I, "how we pa.s.sed it last year, and found the woods all cut and the water drained off?"

"Don't be a wet blanket," said Old Hundred, crossly. "The country has to grow."

I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. The mood of memory was on him. I repented of my speech. "Yes," I answered. "No doubt the country has to grow. The colleges now play hockey on ponds made by the fire department. But there isn't that thrilling ring to your runners nor that long-drawn echo from the wooded sh.o.r.es when a crack crosses the ice."

"I can see it all this minute," said Old Hundred. "I can see my little self like a different person [which, indeed, he was!] as one of the crowd. We had chosen up sides--ten, twenty, thirty on a side. Stones, dragged from the sh.o.r.es, were put down for goals. Most of us had hockey sticks we had cut ourselves in the woods, hickory, with a bit of the curved root for the blade. You were one of the few boys who could afford a store stick. We had a hard rubber ball. Bobbie Pratt was always one goal because he had big feet. And over the black ice, against the sombre background of those cathedral aisles of white pine, we chased that ball, charging in solid ranks so that the ice sagged and protested under the rush of our runners, wheeling suddenly, darting in pursuit of one boy who had snaked the ball out from the maze of feet and was flying with it toward the goal, all rapid action, panting breath, superb life. It really must have been a beautiful sight, one of those hockey games. I can still hear the ring and roar of the runners as the crowd swept down in a charge!"

I smiled. "And I can still feel the ice when somebody's stick got caught between my legs. 'Hi, fellers, come look at the star Willie made!' I can hear you shouting, as you examined the spot where my anatomy had been violently super-imposed on the skating surface."

Old Hundred smiled too. "Fine little animals we were!" he said. "I suppose one reason why we don't see more games nowdays is because we live in the city. Even this suburbanized region is really city, dirtied all over with its sp.a.w.n. Lord, Bill, think if we'd been cramped up in an East Side street, or reduced to Central Park for a skating pond! A precious lot of reminiscences we'd have to-day, wouldn't we? They build the kids what they call public play-grounds, and then they have to hire teachers to teach 'em how to play. Poor beggars, think of having to be taught by a grown-up how to play a game! They all have a rudimentary idea of base-ball; the American spirit and the sporting extras see to that. But I never see 'em playing anything else much, not even out here where the suburbs s.m.u.t an otherwise attractive landscape."

"Perhaps," I ventured, "not only the lack of s.p.a.ce and free open in the city has something to do with it, but the fact that the seasons there grow and change so unperceived. Games, you remember, go by a kind of immutable rotation--as much a law of childhood as gravitation of the universe. Marbles belong to spring, to the first weeks after the frost is out of the ground. They are a kind of celebration of the season, of the return to bare earth. Tops belong to autumn, hockey to the ice, base-ball to the spring and summer, foot-ball to the cold, snappy fall, and I seem to remember that even such games as hide-and-seek or puss-in-the-corner were played constantly at one period, not at all at another. If you played 'em out of time, they didn't seem right; there was no zest to them. Now, most of these game periods were determined long ago by physical conditions of ground and climate. They stem us back to nature. Cramp the youngsters in the artificial life of a city, and you snap this stem. My theory may be wild, all wrong. Yet I can't help feeling that our games, which we accepted and absorbed as a part of the universe, as much as our parents or the woods and fields, _were_ a part of that nature which surrounded us, linking us with the beginnings of the race. Most kids'

games are centuries upon centuries old, they say. I can't help believing that for every sky-sc.r.a.per we erect we end the life, for thousands of children, of one more game."

Old Hundred had listened attentively to my long discourse, nodding his head approvingly. "No doubt, no doubt," he said. "I shall hereafter regard the Metropolitan Tower as a memorial shaft, which ought to bear an inscription, 'Hic jacet, Puss-in-the-corner.' Yet I saw some poor little duffers on the East Side the other day trying to play soak with a tattered old ball, which kept getting lost under the push carts."

"They die hard," said I.

We had by this time come on our walk into a group of houses, the outskirts of a town. Several small boys were, apparently, aimlessly walking about.

"Why don't they _do_ something," Old Hundred exclaimed, half to himself. "Don't they know how, even out here?"

"Suppose you teach 'em," I suggested.

Again Old Hundred grinned. He walked over among the small boys, who stopped their talk and regarded him silently. "Ever play duck-on-the-rock?" he asked, with that curiously embarra.s.sed friendliness of the middle-aged man trying to make up to boyhood.

After a certain period, most of us unconsciously regard a small boy as a kind of buzz-saw, to be handled with extreme care.

The boys looked at one another, as if picking a spokesman. Finally one of them, a freckle-faced, stocky youngster who looked more like a country lad than the rest, replied. "They dunno how," he said.

"They're afraid the stones'll hurt 'em. We used to play it up State all the time."

"There's your theory," said Old Hundred in an aside to me.

"You're a liar," said one of the other boys. "We ain't afraid, are we Bill?"

"Naw," said Bill.

"Who's a liar?" said the first speaker, doubling his fists. "I'll knock your block off in about a minute."

"Ah, come on an' do it, Rube!" taunted the other.

Old Hundred hereupon interfered. "Let's not fight, let's play," he said. "If they don't know how, we'll teach 'em, eh Rube? Want to learn, boys?"

They looked at him for a moment with the instinctive suspicion of their cla.s.s, decided in his favor, and a.s.sented. Like all men, Old Hundred was flattered by this mark of confidence from the severest critics in the world. He and Rube hunted out a large rock, and placed it on the curb. Each boy found his individual duck, Old Hundred tried to count out for It, couldn't remember the rhyme, and had to turn the job over to Rube, who delivered himself of the following:

"As I went up to Salt Lake I met a little rattlesnake, He'd e't so much of jelly cake, It made his little belly ache."

When It was thus selected, automatically and poetically, Old Hundred drew a line in the road, parallel to the curb, It put his duck on the rock, and the rest started to pitch. Suddenly one demon spotted me, a smiling by-stander. "Hi," he called, "Old Coattails ain't playin'."

"Quitter, quitter, quitter!" taunted Old Hundred.

I started to make some remark about the self-consciousness of a learned _litterateur_ of forty-five, but my speech was drowned in a derisive howl from the buzz-saws. I meekly accepted the inevitable, and hunted myself out a duck.

After ten minutes of madly dashing back to the line pursued by those supernaturally active young cubs, after stooping again and again to pick up my duck, after dodging flying stones and sometimes not succeeding, I was quite ready to quit. Old Hundred, flushed and perspiring, was playing as if his life depended on it. When he was tagged, he took his turn as It without a murmur. He was one of the kids, and they knew it. But finally he, too, felt the pace in his bones. We left the boys still playing, quite careless of whether we went or stayed. We were dusty and hot; our hands were scratched and grimed. "Ah!" said Old Hundred, looking back, "I've accomplished something to-day and had a good time doing it! The ungrateful little savages; they might have said good-bye."

"Yet you wouldn't pull up the mumblety-peg for me," I said.

"My dear fellow," he replied, "that is quite different. To take a dare from a man is childish. Not to take a dare from a child is unmanly."

"You talk like G. K. Chesterton," said I.

"Which shows that occasionally Chesterton is right," said he.

"Speaking of dares, I'd like to see a gang of kids playing dares or follow-your-leader right now. Remember how we used to play follow-your-leader by the hour? You had to do just what he did, like a row of sheep. When there were girls in the game, you always ended up by turning a somersault, which was a subtle jest never to be too much enjoyed."

"And Alice Perkins used to take that dare, too, I remember," said I.

"Alice never could bear to be stumped," he mused. "She's either become a mighty fine woman or a bad one. She was the only girl we ever allowed to perform in the circuses up in your backyard. Often we wouldn't even admit girls as spectators. Remember the sign you painted to that effect? She was the lady trapeze artist and bareback rider.

You were the bareback, as I recall it--or was it Fatty Newell? Anyhow, one of her stunts was to hang by her legs and drink a tumbler of water."

I felt my muscles. "I wonder," said I, "if I could still skin the cat?"

"I'll bet I can chin myself ten times," said Old Hundred.

We cast about for a convenient limb. There was an apple-tree beside the road, with a horizontal limb some eight feet above the ground. I tried first. I got myself over all right, till I hung inverted, my fountain-pen, pencil, and eyegla.s.s case falling out of my pocket. But there I stuck. There was no strength in my arms to pull me up. So I curled clean over and dropped to the ground, very red in the face, my clothes covered with the powdered apple-tree bark. Old Hundred grasped the limb to chin himself. He got up once easily, he got up a second time with difficulty, he got up a third time by an heroic effort, the veins standing out on his forehead. The fourth time he stuck two inches off the ground.