In Pawn

by Ellis Parker Butler

Lem, being a boy, was, in my opinion, more or less of a “freak” as the botanists would say. The young are, and should be up to a certain age, unethical. This has the advantage that we can take them when they are innocent of ethics and drill into them the variety of ethics we want them to have. The undrilled youngster, faced with trouble, will tell a fib or the truth quite indifferently, as seems desirable at the moment.

Of course, we begin the drilling at an extremely early age, in these days, and a boy of five has often learned that it is nobler to be spanked for stealing the pie than for lying about it. But he has to be taught, and Lem had not been taught. There had been nothing in his early lack of training to teach him that lying was wrong. He had never been spanked for lying, or shut in a closet for lying, or even scolded or wept over for lying. He had been born with the ability to lie left out of him, or so weak that it shriveled up and blew away before he learned to talk. In the matter of being unable to tell a lie Lem was not to blame; he was born that way.

Neither should we be inclined to blame Henrietta too severely if she romanced frequently, with eyes that looked frankly into other eyes while she was telling whoppers. Henrietta was a mature woman, healthy and attractive, but her ethical development had been arrested when she was about five years old, while her romantic imagination had continued to grow. Henrietta was, in this one respect, abnormal.

We all know, or have known, girls or boys of seven to sixteen years who tell awful lies. There are others who pick up things that don't belong to them; who slip upstairs in a neighbor's house when unwatched and open dresser drawers; otherwise nice girls and boys who just can't help doing such things. Nearly all have frank, honest eyes. They look you in the eyes with saintly innocence and say they did not do it. They are cases of arrested ethical development and cannot help doing what they do. They are abnormal.

Friends and neighbors often say, “Etta Bates is such a liar! Dear, dear! Mrs. Bates ought to take a strap to her. I'd wale that child within an inch of her life, but I'd cure her!” Beating such a child does no good, nor would locking it in prison cure it. The trouble is deeper.

Henrietta had been a handsome girl. At twelve her physical development was that of a young woman of eighteen. She was enthusiastic, noisy, healthy, and untruthful. She liked to romp, especially with boys. She never knew her lessons, because she did not waste time on them, but she was at the head of all when it came to games. When her little friends were still dressing dolls Henrietta had developed the “he said” habit. Judged by Henrietta's tales all the boys were mad over her and thought of nothing else.

A year or so later Henrietta began to be caught in lies. She told her child companions she had gone to dances, gallantly escorted, when she had been safe in bed all the while. Mothers began to say, “I would n't play with Henrietta any more than necessary.”

Henrietta told lies about any subject that at the moment promised to glitter more brilliantly as a lie than as a truth. She said her mother was making her a blue silk dress with red bead embroidery in a sort of Greek design, and the skirt only shoe-top length, when her mother was making her no dress at all. She said her mother was going to take her to New York in the fall, so she could go to a private school where Mr. Vanderbilt's daughters went, and that she was going to room with Mr. Vanderbilt's daughter, when her mother in her wildest dreams had never thought of any such thing. Things like these Henrietta told not only to children, but to grown-ups. She told the minister that her mother had told her to ask him what college she ought to attend if she was going to be a missionary. All this was unpremeditated. She had happened to be passing the minister's house, so she just dropped in and began lying in her frank-eyed, innocent way. The minister believed her until he spoke to her mother. Then there were tears and he agreed to do what he could to reform Henrietta. The result was that she joined the church and went on lying. She was then fourteen.

More frequently her lies had to do with love affairs. She had no love affairs, but she invented them. If, returning from school, a boy walked a block or two with her, she filled every one's ears with tales of his attentions. It was about that time she began buying herself presents—cheap beads, plated pins and bracelets—which she said the boys had given her, and began, also, writing herself “notes” and letters, which she read to the girls, saying the boys had written them.

All the while, except when her romancing made trouble and led to hot flashes of resentment, every one liked Henrietta. She was kind to every one, and polite, and helpful in many small ways. Being found out in her prevarications did not seem to worry her long; it frightened her stunningly at times, making her gasp, but the fright did not last. In a few moments it was all over. The whippings her mother gave her, until she was too big to be whipped, hardly annoyed her. She was fearless physically; she never admitted that anything hurt her.