The Lover and the Tell-Tale
By Stephen Crane (1871-1900)
When young Cora and her parents left on a vacation, Jimmie Trescott moped for two days, becoming a stranger to all former joys. When his old comrades yelled invitation as they swept off on some interesting quest, he replied with mournful gestures of disillusion. He thought often of writing to her but of course the shame of it made him pause. Write a letter to a girl! The mere enormity of the idea caused him shudders. Persons of his quality never wrote letters to girls. Such was the occupation of mollycoddles and snivellers. He knew that if his acquaintances and friends found in him evidences of such weakness and general milkiness, they would fling themselves upon him like so many wolves and bait him beyond the borders of sanity.
However, one day at school in that time of the morning session when children of his age were allowed 15 minutes of play in the school-grounds, he did not as usual rush forth ferociously to his games.
Commonly he was of the worst hoodlums, preying upon his weaker brethren with all the cruel disregard of a grown man. On this particular morning he stayed in the school-room and with his tongue stuck from the corner of his mouth, and his head twisting in a painful way, he wrote to little Cora, pouring out to her all the poetry of his hungry soul as follows:
"My dear Cora I love thee with all my hart
oh come bac again, bac, bac gain for I love thee best of all oh come bac again
When the spring come again we'l fly and we'l fly like a brid."
As for the last word he knew under normal circumstances perfectly well how to spell "bird" but in this case he had transposed two of the letters through excitement, supreme agitation. Nor had this letter been composed without fear and furtive glancing. There was always a number of children who for the time cared more for the quiet of the school-room than for the tempest of the playground and there was always that dismal company who were being forcibly deprived of their recess who were being "kept in."
More than one curious eye was turned upon the desperate and lawless Jimmie Trescott suddenly taken to ways of peace and as he felt these eyes he flushed guiltily, with felonious glances from side to side. It happened that a certain vigilant little girl had a seat directly across the aisle from Jimmie's seat and she had remained in the room during the intermission because of her interest in some absurd domestic details concerning her desk. Parenthetically it might be stated that she was in the habit of imagining this desk to be a house and at this time with an important little frown, indicative of a proper matron, she was engaged in dramatising her ideas of a household.
But this small Rose Goldege happened to be of a family which numbered few males. It was in fact one of those curious middle-class families that hold much of their ground, retain most of their position, after all their visible means of support have been dropped in the grave.
It contained now only a collection of women who existed submissively, defiantly, securely, mysteriously, in a pretentious and often exasperating virtue. It was often too triumphantly clear that they were free of bad habits. However, bad habits is a term here used in a commoner meaning because it is certainly true that the principal and indeed solitary joy which entered their lonely lives was the joy of talking wickedly and busily about their neighbors.
It was all done without dream of its being of the vulgarity of the alleys. Indeed it was simply a constitutional but not incredible chastity and honesty expressing itself in its ordinary superior way of the whirling circles of life and the vehemence of the criticism was not lessened by a further infusion of an acid of worldly defeat, worldly suffering and worldly hopelessness.
Out of this family-circle had sprung the typical little girl who discovered Jimmie Trescott agonizingly writing a letter to his sweetheart. Of course all the children were the most abandoned gossips but she was peculiarly adapted to the purpose of making Jimmie miserable over this particular point. It was her life to sit of evenings about the stove and hearken to her mother and a lot of spinsters talk of many things. During these evenings she was never licensed to utter an opinion either one way or the other way. She was then simply a very little girl sitting open-eyed in the gloom and listening to many things which she often interpreted wrongly. They on their part kept up a kind of a smug-faced pretense of concealing from her information in detail of the wide-spread crime, which in effect may have been more elaborately dangerous than no pretense at all.
Thus all her home teaching fitted her to at once recognize in Jimmie Trescott's manner that he was concealing something that would properly interest the world. She set up a scream. "Oh! Oh! Oh! Jimmie Trescott's writing to his girl! Oh! Oh!" Jimmie cast a miserable glance upon her-a glance in which hatred mingled with despair.
Through the open window, he could hear the boisterous cries of his friends-his hoodlum friends-who would no more understand the utter poetry of his position than they would understand an ancient tribal sign language. His face was set in a truer expression of horror than any of the romances describe upon the features of a man flung into a moat, a man shot in the breast with an arrow, a man cleft in the neck with a battle axe. He was suppedaneous of the fullest power of childish pain. His one course was to rush upon her and attempt by an impossible means of strangulation to keep her important news from the public.
The teacher, a thoughtful young woman at her desk upon the platform, saw a little scuffle which informed her that two of her scholars were larking.
She called out sharply.
The command penetrated to the middle of an early world struggle. In Jimmie's age there was no particular scruple in the minds of the male sex against laying warrior hands upon their weaker sisters. But of course this voice from the throne hindered Jimmie in what might have been a berserk attack.
Even the little girl was retarded by the voice but without being unlawful, she managed to soon shy through the door and out upon the play-ground, yelling: "Oh! Jimmie Trescott's been writing to his girl!"
The unhappy Jimmie was following as closely as he was allowed by his knowledge of the decencies to be preserved under the eye of the teacher. Jimmie himself was mainly responsible for the scene which ensued on the playground.
It is possible that the little girl might have run shrieking his infamy without exciting more than a general but unmilitant interest. These barbarians were excited only by the actual appearance of human woe; in that event, they cheered and danced. Jimmie made the strategic mistake of pursuing little Rose and thus exposed his thin skin to the whole school.
He had in his cowering mind a vision of a hundred children turning from their play under the maple trees and speeding toward him over the gravel with sudden wild taunts. Upon him drove a yelping demoniac mob to which his words were futile. He saw in this mob boys that he dimly knew and his deadly enemies, and his retainers and his most intimate friends.
The virulence of his deadly enemy was no greater than the virulence of his intimate friend. From the outskirts the little informer could be heard still screaming the news like a toy parrot with clockwork inside of it. It broke up all sorts of games not so much because of the mere fact of the letter-writing as because the children knew that some sufferer was at the last point and like little blood-fanged wolves they thronged to the scene of his destruction.
They galloped about him shrilly chanting insults. He turned from one to another only to meet with howls. He was baited. Then, in one instant, he changed all this with a blow. Bang! The most pitiless of the boys near him received a punch fairly and skilfully which made him bellow out like a walrus, and then Jimmie laid desperately into the whole world, striking out frenziedly in all directions.
Boys who could handily whip him and knew it backed away from this onslaught. Here was intention-serious intention. They themselves were not in frenzy and their cooler judgment respected Jimmie's efforts when he ran amok. They saw that it really was none of their affair.
In the meantime the wretched little girl who had caused the bloody riot was away by the fence weeping because boys were fighting. Jimmie several times hit the wrong boy. That is to say, he several times hit a wrong boy hard enough to arouse also in him a spirit of wrath. Jimmie wore a little shirt-waist. It was passing now rapidly into oblivion. He was sobbing and there was one blood-stain upon his cheek.
The school-ground sounded like a pine tree when a hundred crows roost in it at night. Then upon the situation there pealed a brazen bell. It was a bell that these children obeyed even as older nations obey the formal law which is printed in calf-skin. It smote them into some sort of inaction; even Jimmie was influenced by its potency although as a finale he kicked out lustily into the legs of an intimate friend who had been one of the foremost in the torture. When they came to form into line for the march into the school-room it was curious that Jimmie had many admirers.
It was not his prowess; it was the soul he had infused into his gymnastics; and he, still panting, looked about him with a stern and challenging glare. And yet when the long tramping line had entered the school-room his status had again changed. The other children then began to regard him as a boy in disrepair and boys in disrepair were always accosted ominously from the throne.
Jimmie's march toward his seat was a feat. It was composed partly of a most slinking attempt to dodge the perception of the teacher and partly of pure braggadocio erected for the benefit of his observant fellow-men.
The teacher looked carefully down at him. "Jimmie Trescott," she said.
"Yes'm," he answered with a business-like briskness which really spelled out falsity in all its letters.
"Come up to the desk."
He arose mid the awe of the entire school-room. When he arrived, she said: "Jimmie, you've been fighting."
"Yes'm," he answered. This was not so much an admission of the fact as it was a concessional answer to anything she might say.
"Who have you been fighting?" she asked.
"I dunno, 'm."
Whereupon the empress blazed out in wrath. "You don't know who you've been fighting?"
Jimmie looked at her gloomily. "No, 'm."
She seemed about to disintegrate to mere flaming faggots of anger. "You don't know who you've been fighting? " she demanded, blazing. "Well-you stay in after school until you find out."
As he returned to his place all the children knew by his vanquished air that sorrow had fallen upon the house of Trescott. When he took his seat he saw gloating upon him the satanic black eyes of the little Goldege girl.
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Stephen Crane in Corwin Knapp Linson’s studio on West 22nd Street, Manhattan, c. 1894, when Crane was writing The Red Badge of Courage. (Syracuse University Libraries via Roger Williams University) |
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