Minnie:
Of all the fair flowers of Paris,
Of all the red roses of Rome,
Of all the deep tears of Vienna
The sadness wherever you roam,
I think of that night by the lakeside,
he beam of the moon and stars,
And the smell of an aching like perfume,
The tune of the Spanish guitars.
But Monday passed and most of Tuesday and no word came. Then, late in the afternoon of the second day, as he moved vaguely from room to room looking out of different windows into a barren lifeless street, Minnie called him on the phone.
“Yes?” His heart was beating wildly.
“Basil, we’re going this afternoon.”
“Going!” he repeated blankly.
“Oh, Basil, I’m so sorry. Father changed his mind about taking anybody West with us.”
“Oh!”
“I’m so sorry, Basil.”
“I probably couldn’t have gone.”
There was a moment’s silence. Feeling her presence over the wire, he could scarcely breathe, much less speak.
“Basil, can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“We may come back this way. Anyhow, remember we’re going to meet this winter in New York.”
“Yes,” he said, and he added suddenly: “Perhaps we won’t ever meet again.”
“Of course we will. They’re calling me, Basil. I’ve got to go. Goodbye.”
He sat down beside the telephone, wild with grief. The maid found him half an hour later bowed over the kitchen table. He knew what had happened as well as if Minnie had told him. He had made the same old error, undone the behavior of three days in half an hour. It would have been no consolation if it had occurred to him that it was just as well. Somewhere on the trip he would have let go and things might have been worse—though perhaps not so sad. His only thought now was that she was gone.
He lay on his bed, baffled, mistaken, miserable but not beaten. Time after time, the same vitality that had led his spirit to a scourging made him able to shake off the blood like water not to forget, but to carry his wounds with him to new disasters and new atonements—toward his unknown destiny.
Two days later his mother told him that on condition of his keeping the batteries on charge, and washing it once a week, his grandfather had consented to let him use the electric whenever it was idle in the afternoon. Two hours later he was out in it, gliding along Crest Avenue at the maximum speed permitted by the gears and trying to lean back as if it were a Stutz Bearcat. Imogene Bissel waved at him from in front of her house and he came to an uncertain stop.
“You’ve got a car!”
“It’s grandfather’s,” he said modestly. “I thought you were up on that party at the St. Croix.”
She shook her head. “Mother wouldn’t let me go—only a few girls went. There was a big accident over in Minneapolis and mother won’t even let me ride in a car unless there’s someone over eighteen driving.”
“Listen, Imogene, do you suppose your mother meant electrics?”
“Why, I never thought—I don’t know. I could go and see.”
“Tell your mother it won’t go over twelve miles an hour,” he called after her.
A minute later she ran joyfully down the walk. “I can go, Basil,” she cried. “Mother never heard of any wrecks in an electric. What’ll we do?”
“Anything,” he said in a reckless voice. “I didn’t mean that about this bus making only twelve miles an hour—it’ll make fifteen. Listen, let’s go down to Smith’s and have a claret lemonade.”
“Why, Basil Lee!”
The Captured Shadow
I
Basil Duke Lee shut the front door behind him and turned on the dining-room light. His mother’s voice drifted sleepily downstairs:
“Basil, is that you?”
“No, mother, it’s a burglar.”
“It seems to me twelve o’clock is pretty late for a fifteen-year-old boy.”
“We went to Smith’s and had a soda.”
Whenever a new responsibility devolved upon Basil he was “a boy almost sixteen,” but when a privilege was in question, he was “a fifteen-year-old boy.”
There were footsteps above, and Mrs. Lee, in kimono, descended to the first landing.
“Did you and Riply enjoy the play?”
“Yes, very much.”
“What was it about?”
“Oh, it was just about this man. Just an ordinary play.”
“Didn’t it have a name?”
“ ‘Are You a Mason?’ ”
“Oh.” She hesitated, covetously watching his alert and eager face, holding him there. “Aren’t you coming to bed?”
“I’m going to get something to eat.”
“Something more?”
For a moment he didn’t answer. He stood in front of a glassed-in bookcase in the living room, examining its contents with an equally glazed eye.
“We’re going to get up a play,” he said suddenly. “I’m going to write it.”
“Well—that’ll be very nice. Please come to bed soon. You were up late last night, too, and you’ve got dark circles under your eyes.”
From the bookcase Basil presently extracted “Van Bibber and Others,” from which he read while he ate a large plate of straw softened with half a pint of cream. Back in the living room he sat for a few minutes at the piano, digesting, and meanwhile staring at the colored cover of a song from “The Midnight Sons.” It showed three men in evening clothes and opera hats sauntering jovially along Broadway against the blazing background of Times Square.
Basil would have denied incredulously the suggestion that that was currently his favorite work of art. But it was.
He went upstairs. From a drawer of his desk he took out a composition book and opened it.
Basil Duke Lee
St. Regis School
Eastchester, Conn.
Fifth From French
and on the next page, under Irregular Verbs:
| Present |
| je connais |
nous con |
| tu connais |
|
| il connait |
|
He turned over another page.
The porch of the Millionaires’ Club, near New York. Opening Chorus,
| Leilia and Debutantes |
We sing not soft, we sing not loud
For no one ever heard an opening chorus.
We are a very merry crowd
But no one ever heard an opening chorus.
We’re just a crowd of debutantes
As merry as can be
And nothing that there is could ever bore us
We’re the wittiest ones,
|
