“Hello,” said Basil, frowning.
“I been looking for you,” said the little boy, slowly and judicially. “I looked all over—up in your room and out in the gym, and they said you probably might of sneaked off in here.”
“What do you want?” Basil demanded.
“Hold your horses, Bossy.”
Basil jumped to his feet. The little boy retreated a step.
“Go on, hit me!” he chirped nervously. “Go on, hit me, cause I’m just half your size—Bossy.”
Basil winced. “You call me that again and I’ll spank you.”
“No, you won’t spank me. Brick Wales said if you ever touched any of us—”
“But I never did touch any of you.”
“Didn’t you chase a lot of us one day and didn’t Brick Wales—”
“Oh, what do you want?” Basil cried in desperation.
“Doctor Bacon wants you. They sent me after you and somebody said maybe you sneaked in here.”
Basil dropped his letter in his pocket and walked out—the little boy and his invective following him through the door. He traversed a long corridor, muggy with that odour best described as the smell of stale caramels that is so peculiar to boys’ schools, ascended a stairs and knocked at an unexceptional but formidable door.
Doctor Bacon was at his desk. He was a handsome, redheaded Episcopal clergyman of fifty whose original real interest in boys was now tempered by the flustered cynicism which is the fate of all headmasters and settles on them like green mould. There were certain preliminaries before Basil was asked to sit down—gold-rimmed glasses had to be hoisted up from nowhere by a black cord and fixed on Basil to be sure that he was not an impostor; great masses of paper on the desk had to be shuffled through, not in search of anything but as a man nervously shuffles a pack of cards.
“I had a letter from your mother this morning—ah—Basil.” The use of his first name had come to startle Basil. No one else in school had yet called him anything but Bossy or Lee. “She feels that your marks have been poor. I believe you have been sent here at a certain amount of—ah—sacrifice and she expects—”
Basil’s spirit writhed with shame, not at his poor marks but that his financial inadequacy should be so bluntly stated. He knew that he was one of the poorest boys in a rich boys’ school.
Perhaps some dormant sensibility in Doctor Bacon became aware of his discomfort; he shuffled through the papers once more and began on a new note.
“However, that was not what I sent for you about this afternoon. You applied last week for permission to go to New York on Saturday, to a mati. Mr. Davis tells me that for almost the first time since school opened you will be off bounds tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir.”
“That is not a good record. However, I would allow you to go to New York if it could be arranged. Unfortunately, no masters are available this Saturday.”
Basil’s mouth dropped ajar. “Why, I—why, Doctor Bacon, I know two parties that are going. Couldn’t I go with one of them?”
Doctor Bacon ran through all his papers very quickly. “Unfortunately, one is composed of slightly older boys and the other group made arrangements some weeks ago.”
“How about the party that’s going to the Quaker Girl with Mr. Dunn?”
“It’s that party I speak of. They feel that the arrangements are complete and they have purchased seats together.”
Suddenly Basil understood. At the look in his eye Doctor Bacon went on hurriedly.
“There’s perhaps one thing I can do. Of course there must be several boys in the party so that the expenses of the master can be divided up among all. If you can find two other boys who would like to make up a party, and let me have their names by five o’clock, I’ll send Mr. Rooney with you.”
“Thank you,” Basil said.
Doctor Bacon hesitated. Beneath the cynical incrustations of many years an instinct stirred to look into the unusual case of this boy and find out what made him the most detested boy in school. Among boys and masters there seemed to exist an extraordinary hostility towards him, and though Doctor Bacon had dealt with many sorts of schoolboy crimes, he had neither by himself nor with the aid of trusted sixth-formers been able to lay his hands on its underlying cause. It was probably no single thing, but a combination of things; it was most probably one of those intangible questions of personality. Yet he remembered that when he first saw Basil he had considered him unusually prepossessing.
He sighed. Sometimes these things worked themselves out. He wasn’t one to rush in clumsily. “Let us have a better report to send home next month, Basil.”
“Yes, sir.”
Basil ran quickly downstairs to the recreation room. It was Wednesday and most of the boys had already gone into the village of Eastchester, whither Basil, who was still on bounds, was forbidden to follow. When he looked at those still scattered about the pool tables and piano, he saw that it was going to be difficult to get anyone to go with him at all. For Basil was quite conscious that he was the most unpopular boy at school.
It had begun almost immediately. One day, less than a fortnight after he came, a crowd of the smaller boys, perhaps urged on to it, gathered suddenly around him and began calling him Bossy. Within the next week he had two fights, and both times the crowd was vehemently and eloquently with the other boy. Soon after, when he was merely shoving indiscriminately, like everyone else, to get into the dining-room, Carver, the captain of the football team, turned about and, seizing him by the back of the neck, held him and dressed him down savagely. He joined a group innocently at the piano and was told, “Go on away. We don’t want you around.”
After a month he began to realize the full extent of his unpopularity. It shocked him. One
