Taking off his well-fitting opera hat, he bowed ironically from the waist. Then, like a flash, he turned and was gone into the night.
“You get up to New York only once a month,” Lewis Crum was saying, “and then you have to take a master along.”
Slowly, Basil Lee’s glazed eyes turned from the barns and billboards of the Indiana countryside to the interior of the Broadway Limited. The hypnosis of the swift telegraph poles faded and Lewis Crum’s stolid face took shape against the white slipcover of the opposite bench.
“I’d just duck the master when I got to New York,” said Basil.
“Yes, you would!”
“I bet I would.”
“You try it and you’ll see.”
“What do you mean saying I’ll see, all the time, Lewis? What’ll I see?”
His very bright dark-blue eyes were at this moment fixed upon his companion with boredom and impatience. The two had nothing in common except their age, which was fifteen, and the lifelong friendship of their fathers—which is less than nothing. Also they were bound from the same Middle-Western city for Basil’s first and Lewis’s second year at the same Eastern school.
But, contrary to all the best traditions, Lewis the veteran was miserable and Basil the neophyte was happy. Lewis hated school. He had grown entirely dependent on the stimulus of a hearty vital mother, and as he felt her slipping farther and farther away from him, he plunged deeper into misery and homesickness. Basil, on the other hand, had lived with such intensity on so many stories of boarding-school life that, far from being homesick, he had a glad feeling of recognition and familiarity. Indeed, it was with some sense of doing the appropriate thing, having the traditional roughhouse, that he had thrown Lewis’s comb off the train at Milwaukee last night for no reason at all.
To Lewis, Basil’s ignorant enthusiasm was distasteful—his instinctive attempt to dampen it had contributed to the mutual irritation.
“I’ll tell you what you’ll see,” he said ominously. “They’ll catch you smoking and put you on bounds.”
“No, they won’t, because I won’t be smoking. I’ll be in training for football.”
“Football! Yeah! Football!”
“Honestly, Lewis, you don’t like anything, do you?”
“I don’t like football. I don’t like to go out and get a crack in the eye.” Lewis spoke aggressively, for his mother had canonized all his timidities as common sense. Basil’s answer, made with what he considered kindly intent, was the sort of remark that creates lifelong enmities.
“You’d probably be a lot more popular in school if you played football,”—he suggested patronizingly.
Lewis did not consider himself unpopular. He did not think of it in that way at all. He was astounded.
“You wait!” he cried furiously. “They’ll take all that freshness out of you.”
“Clam yourself,” said Basil, coolly plucking at the creases of his first long trousers. “Just clam yourself.”
“I guess everybody knows you were the freshest boy at the Country Day!”
“Clam yourself,” repeated Basil, but with less assurance. “Kindly clam yourself.”
“I guess I know what they had in the school paper about you—”
Basil’s own coolness was no longer perceptible.
“If you don’t clam yourself,” he said darkly, “I’m going to throw your brushes off the train too.”
The enormity of this threat was effective. Lewis sank back in his seat, snorting and muttering, but undoubtedly calmer. His reference had been to one of the most shameful passages in his companion’s life. In a periodical issued by the boys of Basil’s late school there had appeared under the heading Personals:
If someone will please poison young Basil, or find some other means to stop his mouth, the school at large and myself will be much obliged.
The two boys sat there fuming wordlessly at each other. Then, resolutely, Basil tried to re-inter this unfortunate souvenir of the past. All that was behind him now. Perhaps he had been a little fresh, but he was making a new start. After a moment, the memory passed and with it the train and Lewis’s dismal presence—the breath of the East came sweeping over him again with a vast nostalgia. A voice called him out of the fabled world; a man stood beside him with a hand on his sweater-clad shoulder.
“Lee!”
“Yes, sir.”
“It all depends on you now. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right,” the coach said, “go in and win.”
Basil tore the sweater from his stripling form and dashed out on the field. There were two minutes to play and the score was 3 to 0 for the enemy, but at the sight of young Lee, kept out of the game all year by a malicious plan of Dan Haskins, the school bully, and Weasel Weems, his toady, a thrill of hope went over the St. Regis stand.
“33–12–16–22!” barked Midget Brown, the diminutive little quarterback.
It was his signal—
“Oh, gosh!” Basil spoke aloud, forgetting the late unpleasantness. “I wish we’d get there before tomorrow.”
II
St. Regis School, Eastchester,
, 19—
Dear Mother:There is not much to say today, but I thought I would write you about my allowance. All the boys have a bigger allowance than me, because there are a lot of little things I have to get, such as shoe laces, etc. School is still very nice and am having a fine time, but football is over and there is not much to do. I am going to New York this week to see a show. I do not know yet what it will be, but probably the Quacker Girl or little boy Blue as they are both very good. Dr. Bacon is very nice and there’s a good phycission in the village. No more now as I have to study Algebra.
As he put the letter in its envelope, a wizened little boy came into
