Ah, sweet were those hours together we spent
In innocent laughter and joy!
How little we knew at the time what it meant
To be just a boy—just a boy!”
—the hold-up man would drop his automatic gun, and the two would dissolve on each other’s necks in a flood of sympathetic tears.
It is a pleasant and harmless fallacy, and I for one would not destroy it; I am no such stickler for exactitude that I would take away from any man whatever pleasure he may derive from thinking that he was once a barefoot boy, even if circumstances were against him and his mother as adamant in her refusal to let him go barefooted. But the fallacy is indestructible: the symbols may not have been universal, but it is true enough of boyhood that time then seems to be without limit; and this comfortable, unthinking sense of immortality is what men have lost and would fain recover. One forgets how cruelly slow moved the hands of the school-room clock through the last, long, lingering, eternal fifteen minutes of the daily life-sentence. One forgets how feverishly the seconds chased each other, faster than human feet could follow, when one’s little self was late for school, and the clamor of the distant bell ended in a solemn, ominous silence. Then was the opportunity for stout heart to play “hookey,” and to lure the finny tribe with a poor worm impaled on a bent pin; and that, in the opinion of all the editors of all the newspapers in the United States, is what all of us always did. But in the painful reality most of us, I think, tried to overtake those feverish seconds, seeking indeed to outrun time, and somehow or other, though the bell had stopped ringing, get unostentatiously into our little seats before it stopped. And so we ran, and ran, and ran, lifting one leaden foot after the other with hopeless determination, in a silent, nightmare world where the road was made of glue and the very trees along the way turned their leaves to watch us drag slowly by. Little respect we would have had then for the poet Byron and his “Ah! happy years! once more, who would not be a boy?”
But even when time seemed to stand still, or go too fast, we had no consciousness that the complicated clock of our individual existence could ever run down and stop; and so happily careless were we of this treasure, that we often wished to be men! “When I was young,” says the author of “The Boy’s Week-Day Book,”—another volume that is not read nowadays as much as it used to be,—
I doubted not the time would come,
When grown to man’s estate,
That I would be a noble ‘squire,
And live among the great.
It was a proud, aspiring thought,
That should have been exiled:—
I wish I was more humble now
Than when I was a child.
I wonder what proud, aspiring thought Uncle Jones, as he called himself, just then had in mind; but it was evidently no wish to be a boy again: perhaps he meditated matrimony.
For my own part I cannot successfully wish to be a boy; I remain impervious to all the efforts of all the editors of all the newspapers in the United States to dim my eye; and there must be many another eye like mine, or else it is unbelievably unique. I lean back in my chair, close my undimmed eye, and do my best; but, contrary to all editorial expectation, I can summon no desire to go barefooted, fish with a bent pin, or revisit the old swimming-hole
Where the elm and the chestnut o’ershadowed the bowl,
And tempered the hot summer weather.
I prefer a beach and a bathing-suit and somebody my own age. Yet do not think, shocked reader, that I am unsympathetic with youth. I am more sympathetic—that is all—with my contemporaries; and the thought forces itself upon me that boyhood is a narrow and conventional period, in which my own desire to go without shoes was exactly similar to my mother’s determination to wear a bustle. Equally anxious to follow the fashion of our respective sets, neither understood the other; and I would no more have worn a bustle than my mother would have gone barefooted. My father, similarly thwarted in a single desire, would have cared less: his wider interests—politics, business, family, the local and world gossip that immersed him in his newspaper, art, literature, music, and the drama, to say nothing of professional baseball and pugilism (in which, however, many fathers and sons have a common interest)—would have absorbed his disappointment.