After drinking tea and making faces for a while, Mr. Juddikins would put on his shabby hat and his skimpy overcoat, kiss them all around and go off. In one pocket he carried a bit of lunch, in the other a letter of recommendation. In his heart Mr. Juddikins bore a strange and thrilling hope: Today he would get the job, and henceforth all would be rosy and jolly for the Juddikins family. But somehow to-day was never the day, and every night Mr. Juddikins would come home tired and discouraged, his cheerful eyes clouded, his smile gone, his perky tie sagging at a most dejected angle. It was all very bad, and Jerry felt so sorry for his father. Book indeed! What kind of boy would he be to mention book at a time like this?
Jerry went to school on Peppermint Place. It was a lovely school, where canaries sang in little glittering cages and geraniums bloomed like red soldiers in straight rows at the windows, and where in winter a fire boomed in a big, deep fireplace, and in summer the peppermint trees flung white-blossomed arms in at the windows. Were they really peppermint trees? I confess I don’t know. The grown-ups said not, and called them lindens and catalpas and chestnuts. But the children said they were: else why should the square be called Peppermint Place? Grown-ups have a tiresome way of being right about things like that, yet why should a square be called Peppermint Place if the trees aren’t peppermint trees? Moreover, the children said that if you went to the square at midnight the flowers were peppermint, and they said they could smell them in the early morning when they first got to school—a left-over, faint, but delicious smell that was nothing if it was not peppermint blossoms washed over with midnight dew. Nobody had ever been at Peppermint Place at midnight, so nobody could really deny what the children said. So I am inclined to believe that for once the grown-ups were wrong, and that the trees were really peppermint—at midnight anyway.
From nine to ten the children at this school read and did arithmetic problems. Jerry had struggled from nine to ten many mornings with the queer marks in his primer, until, lo, one morning he found he could read—all as sudden and surprising as that. From ten to eleven they sang and drank cocoa and played games around the fire. From eleven to twelve they took naps, then read some more, and looked up cities and rivers on the big globe over by the red soldiers in the window, and wrote on the blackboard. From twelve to one they played in the garden behind the school. This was a special garden, just for children. It had signs up like these: “Parents and Dogs Not Allowed”; “Please Walk on the Grass”; “Trespassing Allowed.” And at one o’clock the children went home.
Jerry loved school. He loved the reading and the cocoa and the geraniums on parade, though he did wonder sometimes about those geraniums. Didn’t they get tired of just being dressed up and parading, and long to break ranks and have a good fight? Even toy soldiers have wars; these were such peaceful soldiers. But you can’t fight if you don’t have any enemies, and the geranium soldiers didn’t. Everybody loved them; consequently their life was one long peace. Jerry liked the boys at school, too—Peter the Little, and Johnnie O’Day, and the Bumpus twins who had such interesting pockets, fishing worms and marbles and snake skins and arrows and tops and kite strings and magnets, all in one inviting jumble. He even liked the butterflies on top of the girls’ heads, pink and brown and red ribbons that perched there and looked always ready to fly.
But he didn’t like the girls. He simply couldn’t stand the girls. Girls swished their skirts, for one thing, the important silly creatures; swished them into the room and down the aisles, and even when they got safely into their seats they swished and fidgeted and squirmed around, spread out those skirts in wide circles around them, and patted them down in such an utterly silly way. They snickered, too, all the time. Hee, hee, hee! Tee, hee, hee! Jerry could positively hear them in his sleep; he could see them in the dark, putting up small hands before their faces, hee-heeing and tee-heeing behind them, and rolling foolish eyes around. Also, they were cowards and cravens—squealed at the sight of a spider, couldn’t climb a tree worth a cent, sniffled when their feelings were hurt. A detestable tribe, girls!
Jerry used to wonder if his baby sister would grow up to be one of them, swishing her skirts and giggling and sniffling. Most likely. Anybody that would eat hairbrushes would no doubt grow up just as silly. And he used to wonder, too, how it was that women like his mother and the teacher, such utterly lovely people as they now were, had ever been just girls. Could his teacher really have been like these? Did she never throw a ball right, or climb a tree decently, or carry a toad in her pocket? Oh, yes, toads! The girls said they made warts. Fancy that, if you can. Warts! And supposing toads did make warts, who cared? No, Jerry couldn’t endure girls, and that was why he didn’t want a single girl in his whole book when he got it, if he ever did get it. A world without girls was impossible, it seemed; there were such hordes and swarms of them; but a book without girls was entirely feasible, and that was the kind of book Jerry wanted.
And then one day, two weeks before Christmas, it suddenly began to look as though Jerry might get his book after all. It was the teacher’s idea, and when she had suggested it Jerry wondered why in the world he hadn’t thought of such a simple thing. The teacher said: “Now today we’re going to write our letters to Santa Claus. Peter, you pass the pencils, please, and Katinka may distribute the papers. And you must all tell Santa just what you want, and don’t forget commas and periods. Santa Claus is very partial to commas and periods. Last week Katinka wrote a whole page without a single comma. I can’t think what made her.”
Katinka, who was passing papers blushed guiltily, and Jerry, though he hated girls, felt a little sorry for her. Katinka was hardly as odious as most girls. She had reddish short curls, and she wore green butterflies on them. She was fattish, her face was usually sticky from lollipops, her aprons were always torn and dirty, but even she switched herself around a good deal; couldn’t help it, being a girl, Jerry supposed. And once she had stopped in front of Jerry’s house to pat Mutt with a grimy, affectionate paw.
Well, Jerry wrote his letter. He knew precisely what he wanted. So he told Santa Claus all about it, told him about the dragons and pirates and lions and soldiers he wanted in the book, mentioned the blue cover, explained the size, called Santa’s attention to his record as a good boy all year, and stated that there must be no girls in the book. Then he went over the letter, scattering commas and periods lavishly in every sentence, and signed his name, Jerry Juddikins, 123 Whippoorwill Road. As Jerry watched it go up the chimney, he felt a tug at his heart he had never quite felt before; he would get his precious book on Christmas morning; Santa Claus would see to that.
Benjamin Bookfellow came into his workshop the next morning rubbing his hands and telling himself what a really fine job he had in the world, anyway. To live in the North Country with Santa Claus and Mrs. Claus and all the toymakers, to write books all year long for children’s Christmas stockings—what could be finer than that, asked Benjamin Bookfellow of himself. Most of all, he thought, he liked this cozy room of his where the sun shone in so gayly and the Plot Tree, thick with plots for stories, reared its beautiful branches over his head. Benjamin Bookfellow was very happy that morning as he settled down to Page Twenty-four of “Chief Thunder-cloud’s Revenge,” a book he was writing for a little tomboy of a girl, named Katinka, who liked Indian stories almost as much as she liked lollipops, which was saying a good deal.