Royal was a lean, rangy, bright-haired lad, with a clear skin and a good carriage. He had nobly-set blue eyes whose depths seemed practically bottomless, the young eyes that suggest both heaven and hell. He had also a determined chin that often pushed him into positions in which his undetermined nose was of no use whatever. Oh, quite the ordinary type of boy whose unusualness is chiefly within! Perhaps the most striking thing about him, thus far, was his passion for beauty; beauty to be seen, heard, tasted, clasped, protected, prayed to. There was Scotch blood in him; he had plenty of second sight, but was often found lacking in that vulgar variety of first sight known as common sense.
In planning his travels, he had seen himself, now as a sailor in tarry trousers, jingling strange coins in foreign ports that reeked with incredible oaths and aromas; now as a gifted young scholar, teaching French to some sturdy blacksmith’s fair daughters, in exchange for a noggin of milk and a brace of doughnuts, since you can’t expect cakes and ale in this country; and now as a prince-in-disguise mechanic out of work, in smutched overalls, with nothing clean at all about him but his teeth; his toothbrush would tell the world. Royal recognized the weakness of his own fables. He knew well enough that, unlike practical Peter he himself could scarcely tell a bolt from a bit-stock, or a belaying-pin from a bo’s’n’s whistle; and also (here Peter would be no better off) that he would certainly be unable to explain away the French subjunctive, in case the prettier of the blacksmith’s daughters should show an unfortunate curiosity about a topic so repugnant. Yes, Royal was a stern critic of his own castles, and therefore spent much time in rebuilding them.
Royal on his travels soon found that three days were all too brief a term for such adventures as he sought. His mother and he had been reading the “Crock of Gold” together, and he knew that she would understand him when he wrote, on the second day of his faring:
“Dear Mother, I am with the leprecauns, and so shall not return as early as we said. Fear not, all is well with me. The world is wide, the weather fine, and the extra $3.75 you gave me is hardly touched as yet. Besides, I can earn what I need, if I need more than I have. I love the feel of this life in the open, and you know how much I want to spin the wheel of life, in my own philosopher fashion.”
Thus wrote Royal, giving neither date nor address, and incontinently planning to reach far cities by means of gondola cars. His mother was hurt, irritated, and anxious, in equal parts; but she understood her boy well enough to know that there was some fabric to his fustian. Uncle Tom jeered openly, saying that people who breakfast with the leprecauns may have to sup with the lepers, if they don’t watch out. These psychiatrists have a way of taking the worm’s-eye view of high doings.
III
Within a week, the Royal progress had swept through parts of three of our United States, without serious damage either to the lad or to the landscape. The curve of operations was now fast shaping itself into a circle. Day and night, the weather had been magically lovely. Royal had gladly passed the first three nights à la belle étoile; with keen relish, he rolled the phrase under his tongue, thinking that now not a boy in Froggy Beaurivage’s French Literature classes understood its charm as well as he. His Norfolk coat, a bore by day, proved a godsend in the chill hours before dawn, and he knew the use of a Sunday paper as a mattress. Before falling asleep, he would gaze with delight into the skies; thrilled with their beauty and immensity, he would say to himself, “After this, I am changed forever; I shall always be something more than I was before I came here.” No doubt he was right.
And his days were no less wondrous, for their sun, and shade, and good going. Sometimes, when he was beginning to feel dusty or weary, an unexpected pool would signal to him from beside a shaded road; and when he came up from it, he was a new-made creature. He liked being solitary, yet he liked stopping at sudden inns for frugal meals, and he liked chatting with the wayfarers he met. The latter half of the week had moments less idyllic. His fourth night he spent in a box car, his fifth in a boarding-house for Polish immigrants, and his sixth, in part at least, in the jail-room of a village town-hall, where he had been held in custody on a false charge of having stolen an automobile.
His code was very explicit as to stealing. He made a point of stealing and begging nothing but rides of various sorts. He had begged and received rides in hay-carts, touring-cars, lumber-trucks: he had also managed to get without cost considerable railroad transportation. It sounds crooked, to me! But of course each type of ride has its good and bad points. He took whatever fruit he saw lying on the ground, on the public side of fences; it was astonishing what excellent pickings were to be had in this way; he felt that an essay on economics might be written on this subject. But he never entered an orchard, never even shook a wayside tree. His head was full of these delicate distinctions. From Kipling he had imbibed the idea that the white man’s burden can best be sustained in dark lands by the unfailing practice of wearing a dinner jacket in the evening, no matter how solitary the meal. Noblesse oblige! And it keeps you from sinking. The idea had appealed to Royal, and he had invented a variant of it to use in his travels. He would at all times deal with the fruits of the earth exactly as if the owner of them were watching him. No unheroic task! If he should fall once, he told himself, it would be all the easier to fall again, and yet again; and then where are you? As a matter of exact record, he did not fall once; and I see no reason why this may not be set down to his credit. It is of course regrettable that a principle which worked so well for agriculture could not have been applied to transportation also.
Thus, by being partly prig, partly poet, partly his own stage-manager, and altogether boy, Royal was taking steps toward being a man. There was absolute truth in his protestations before the one-armed justice of the peace (apparently the universal functionary of the village) that he knew nothing of the stolen car, nothing whatever, from fender to tail-light. Unluckily, on being asked his father’s name and address, he gave a wholly fantastic reply, his brain being stuffed to capacity with material for such purposes. I believe that he had a laudable idea of protecting the family by “putting one over” on the village Dogberry. But by a lamentable oversight, disclosed to the one-armed man on consulting directories and maps, the county of Chesterfolk, in the adjoining State, acknowledged no township called Four Bridges; and even had there been such a place, it still remains doubtful whether Royal’s putative father, Algernon M. Hollingsworth, that splendid creature born of necessity’s invention, would ever have been content to live there. Other questions were put; Royal’s Whither was found to be fully as obscure as his Whence. He was therefore clapped as a “suspicious vagrant” into the jail-room, a high and narrow cubicle left over from the previous century, and unused for years except for the occasional storing of the movie-man’s impedimenta on wet evenings.