The Court of Boyville

by William Allen White

If the two entered a crowd and played "foot and a half" or "slap and a kick" or "leap-frog," and if Mealy was "it"—and poor Mealy was generally "it" in any game—Piggy did not jump viciously on Mealy's wobbly back, nor did he slap hard, nor kick hard, as he would have slapped and kicked on other days, before he descended from his throne to dwell with the beasts of the field on that fatal Friday. Pride kept Mealy on the rack.

Time and again his little, freckled, milky face hit the moist springy ground as Bud or Abe or Jim bumped into him at their play. He was glad when the day ended and he could go home. For Mealy Jones abhorred the dirt that begrimed his face and soiled his white starched collar. He liked to play in lukewarm water, to slosh in the suds, and to rub his soft little hands whiter and whiter in the foam. His cleanliness pleased his mother, and she boasted of it to the mothers of other boys—mothers of boys with high-water marks just above their shirt collars; of boys who had to be yanked back to the roller-towel after washing to have their ears rubbed; of bad, bad, bad boys who washed their feet in the dew of the grass at night and told their mothers that they had washed them in the tub at the pump; of wicked and sinful boys who killed toads and cried noisily when their warts bled in the hot water; in fact, to the mothers of nearly all the boys in Boyville. And thus it came about that Boyville having Mealy Jones set before it as a model child, contracted a cordial hate for him, and rose against him when he presumed to contest with Piggy for his Heart's Desire. Yet all Boyville loved a fight, and all Boyville goaded the King to wrath, teased him, bantered him, and even pretended to doubt his worth. Therefore, when Piggy Pennington, the King of Boyville, dressed for the party that night in his Sunday clothes and his Sunday shoes and limped down the sidewalk to the Jones's, where the boys and girls were to meet before descending upon Bud Perkins, there was rancor in the royal heart and maternal hair-oil on the royal head. But a strange throb of glad pain in the pit of the royal stomach came at the thought of the two bright eyes that would soon meet his own. The eyes made him forget his blistering shoes, and a smile at the door divested his mind of the serrated collar upon which his head had been pivoting for five distracted minutes. The last thing of all to go was his pride in the hair-oil, but it fell before a voice that said: "Well, you got here, did you?"

That was all. But it was enough to make Piggy Pennington feel the core of a music-box turning inside him, while outside the company saw the King of Boyville transformed into a very red and very sweaty youth holding madly to the back of his cuffs and chuckling deliriously. In a daze he took off his hat, and put a sack of oranges, his part in the evening's refreshment, on a table in the next room. When he regained consciousness, Piggy noticed that Mealy Jones, who had pranced into the room with much unction, was sitting next to his Heart's Desire. The children were making merry chatter. Piggy took his place on the end of a lounge, and turning his back to the guilty pair, gave an "injin" pinch to Jimmy Sears, with orders to "pass it on."

Indeed, so unconcerned was Piggy in the progress of the affair behind him that he began to shove the line of the boys on the lounge; the shoving grew into a scuffle, and the scuffle into a wrestle, which ended on the front porch. At length Piggy stalked through the room where the girls were sitting, saying, when he returned with his oranges and his hat: "Come on, fellers, everybody's here."

The boys on the porch followed Piggy's example, and in a minute or two they stood huddled at the gate calling at the girls in the house to hurry. When the girls were on the porch, the boys struck out, and the two groups, a respectful distance apart, walked through the town. Mealy Jones was enjoying the triumph of his life, walking proudly between the noisy boys and giggling girls, beside—but why linger over the details of this instance of man's duplicity and woman's worse than weakness!

The young blades of the Court of Boyville waited politely at the gate before the house where Bud Perkins lived with Miss Morgan, his foster mother. When the maidens arrived, all the company went trooping up Miss Morgan's steps. After Piggy had chased Bud from the front door into a closet, from which the host fought his way gallantly into the middle of the parlor floor, the essential preliminaries of the evening's entertainment were over. A little later the games began. First, there was "forfeits." Then came "tin-tin." "Clap in and clap out" followed, and finally, after much protestation from the girls, but at the earnest solicitation of Mealy Jones, "post-office" started. Piggy did not urge, nor protest. He had gone through the games listlessly, occasionally breaking into a spasm of gayety that was clearly hollow, and afterwards sinking into profound indifference. For how could a well-conditioned boy be gay with a heartache under his Sunday shirt and the spectacle before his eyes of a freckled human cock-sparrow darting round and round the bower of his Heart's Desire? Under such circumstances it was clearly impossible for him to see the eyes that sought his in vain across the turmoil of the room. Indeed, a voice pitched a trifle high to carry well spoke for him to hear, but met deaf ears. A little maid in a black-and-red check which the King of Boyville once preferred to royal purple, even made her way across the throng—undesignedly, he thought, but Piggy basked in the joy of her presence and made no sign to show his pleasure. A little later, in the shuffle of the game, Piggy and his Heart's Desire were far apart. Half an hour passed, but still he did not revive. Mealy Jones called her out in "post-office," and Piggy thought he saw her smile. That was too much. When the dining-room door closed behind the black-and-red checked dress, the pitcher that enclosed his woe broke and the wheel at the cistern of his endurance stopped. Mealy Jones came into the room, and the boy who kept the "post-office" called out, "Piggy Pennington." But the slam of the front door was his answer.

Piggy sat on the front porch, and reviewed the entire affair. It began when his Heart's Desire had fluttered into his autograph album with a coy: