“What are you doing?” Basil demanded.
His roommate looked at him stonily. “I’m moving in with Wales,” he said.
“Oh!”
Treadway went on with his packing. He carried out a suitcase full, then another, took down some pennants and dragged his trunk into the hall. Basil watched him bundle his toilet things into a towel and take one last survey about the room’s new barrenness to see if there was anything forgotten.
“Goodbye,” he said to Basil, without a ripple of expression on his face.
“Goodbye.”
Treadway went out. Basil turned over once more and choked into the pillow.
“Oh, poor Babette!” he cried huskily. “Poor little Babette! Poor little Babette!” Babette, svelte and piquante, looked down at him coquettishly from the wall.
IV
Doctor Bacon, sensing Basil’s predicament and perhaps the extremity of his misery, arranged it that he should go into New York, after all. He went in the company of Mr. Rooney, the football coach and history teacher. At twenty Mr. Rooney had hesitated for some time between joining the police force and having his way paid through a small New England college; in fact he was a hard specimen and Doctor Bacon was planning to get rid of him at Christmas. Mr. Rooney’s contempt for Basil was founded on the latter’s ambiguous and unreliable conduct on the football field during the past season—he had consented to take him to New York for reasons of his own.
Basil sat meekly beside him on the train, glancing past Mr. Rooney’s bulky body at the Sound and the fallow fields of Westchester County. Mr. Rooney finished his newspaper, folded it up and sank into a moody silence. He had eaten a large breakfast and the exigencies of time had not allowed him to work it off with exercise. He remembered that Basil was a fresh boy, and it was time he did something fresh and could be called to account. This reproachless silence annoyed him.
“Lee,” he said suddenly, with a thinly assumed air of friendly interest, “why don’t you get wise to yourself?”
“What, sir?” Basil was startled from his excited trance of this morning.
“I said why don’t you get wise to yourself?” said Mr. Rooney in a somewhat violent tone. “Do you want to be the butt of the school all your time here?”
“No, I don’t.” Basil was chilled. Couldn’t all this be left behind for just one day?
“You oughtn’t to get so fresh all the time. A couple of times in history class I could just about have broken your neck.” Basil could think of no appropriate answer. “Then out playing football,” continued Mr. Rooney, “—you didn’t have any nerve. You could play better than a lot of ’em when you wanted, like that day against the Pomfret seconds, but you lost your nerve.”
“I shouldn’t have tried for the second team,” said Basil. “I was too light. I should have stayed on the third.”
“You were yellow, that was all the trouble. You ought to get wise to yourself. In class, you’re always thinking of something else. If you don’t study, you’ll never get to college.”
“I’m the youngest boy in the fifth form,” Basil said rashly.
“You think you’re pretty bright, don’t you?” He eyed Basil ferociously. Then something seemed to occur to him that changed his attitude and they rode for a while in silence. When the train began to run through the thickly clustered communities near New York, he spoke again in a milder voice and with an air of having considered the matter for a long time:
“Lee, I’m going to trust you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You go and get some lunch and then go on to your show. I’ve got some business of my own I got to attend to, and when I’ve finished I’ll try to get to the show. If I can’t, I’ll anyhow meet you outside.” Basil’s heart leaped up. “Yes, sir.”
“I don’t want you to open your mouth about this at school—I mean, about me doing some business of my own.”
“No, sir.”
“We’ll see if you can keep your mouth shut for once,” he said, making it fun. Then he added, on a note of moral sternness, “And no drinks, you understand that?”
“Oh, no, sir!” The idea shocked Basil. He had never tasted a drink, nor even contemplated the possibility, save the intangible and nonalcoholic champagne of his café dreams.
On the advice of Mr. Rooney he went for luncheon to the Manhattan Hotel, near the station, where he ordered a club sandwich, French fried potatoes, and a chocolate parfait. Out of the corner of his eye he watched the nonchalant, debonair, blasé New Yorkers at neighbouring tables, investing them with a romance by which these possible fellow citizens of his from the Middle West lost nothing. School had fallen from him like a burden; it was no more than an unheeded clamour, faint and far away. He even delayed opening the letter from the morning’s mail which he found in his pocket, because it was addressed to him at school.
He wanted another chocolate parfait, but being reluctant to bother the busy waiter any more, he opened the letter and spread it before him instead. It was from his mother:
Dear Basil:
This is written in great haste, as I didn’t want to frighten you by telegraphing. Grandfather is going abroad to take the waters and he wants you and me to come too. The idea is that you’ll go to school at Grenoble or Montreux for the rest of the year and learn the language and we’ll be close by. That is, if you want to. I know how you like St. Regis and playing football and baseball, and of course there would be none of that; but on the other hand, it would be a nice change, even if it postponed your entering Yale by an extra year. So, as usual, I want you to do just as you like. We will be leaving home almost as soon as you get this and will
