By three o’clock, Basil, reading the Crimson Sweater up in his room, began giving attentive ear to every ring at the bell. He would go to the head of the stairs, lean over and call, “Hilda, was that a package for me?” And at four, dissatisfied with her indifference, her lack of feeling for important things, her slowness in going to and returning from the door, he moved downstairs and began attending to it himself. But nothing came. He phoned Barton Leigh’s and was told by a busy clerk: “You’ll get that suit. I’ll guarantee that you’ll get that suit.” But he did not believe in the clerk’s honour and he moved out on the porch and watched for Barton Leigh’s delivery wagon.
His mother came home at five. “There were probably more alterations than they thought,” she suggested helpfully. “You’ll probably get it tomorrow morning.”
“Tomorrow morning!” he exclaimed incredulously. “I’ve got to have that suit tonight.”
“Well, I wouldn’t be too disappointed if I were you, Basil. The stores all close at half-past five.”
Basil took one agitated look up and down Holly Avenue. Then he got his cap and started on a run for the street car at the corner. A moment later a cautious afterthought caused him to retrace his steps with equal rapidity.
“If they get here, keep them for me,” he instructed his mother—a man who thought of everything.
“All right,” she promised dryly, “I will.”
It was later than he thought. He had to wait for a trolley, and when he reached Barton Leigh’s he saw with horror that the doors were locked and the blinds drawn. He intercepted a last clerk coming out and explained vehemently that he had to have his suit tonight. The clerk knew nothing about the matter… Was Basil Mr. Schwartze?
No, Basil was not Mr. Schwartze. After a vague argument wherein he tried to convince the clerk that whoever promised him the suit should be fired, Basil went dispiritedly home.
He would not go to the fair without his suit—he would not go at all. He would sit at home and luckier boys would go adventuring along its Great White Way. Mysterious girls, young and reckless, would glide with them through the enchanted darkness of the Old Mill, but because of the stupidity, selfishness and dishonesty of a clerk in a clothing store he would not be there. In a day or so the fair would be over—forever—those girls, of all living girls the most intangible, the most desirable, that sister, said to be nicest of all—would be lost out of his life. They would ride off in Blatz Wildcats into the moonlight without Basil having kissed them. No, all his life—though he would lose the clerk his position: “You see now what your act did to me”—he would look back with infinite regret upon that irretrievable hour. Like most of us, he was unable to perceive that he would have any desires in the future equivalent to those that possessed him now.
He reached home; the package had not arrived. He moped dismally about the house, consenting at half-past six to sit silently at dinner with his mother, his elbows on the table.
“Haven’t you any appetite, Basil?”
“No, thanks,” he said absently, under the impression he had been offered something.
“You’re not going away to school for two more weeks. Why should it matter—”
“Oh, that isn’t the reason I can’t eat. I had a sort of headache all afternoon.”
Towards the end of the meal his eye focused abstractedly on some slices of angel cake; with the air of a somnambulist, he ate three.
At seven he heard the sounds that should have ushered in a night of romantic excitement.
The Leaming car stopped outside, and a moment later Riply Buckner rang the bell. Basil rose gloomily.
“I’ll go,” he said to Hilda. And then to his mother, with vague impersonal reproach, “Excuse me a minute. I just want to tell them I can’t go to the fair tonight.”
“But of course you can go, Basil. Don’t be silly. Just because—”
He scarcely heard her. Opening the door, he faced Riply on the steps. Beyond was the Leaming limousine, an old high car, quivering in silhouette against the harvest moon.
Clop-clop-clop! Up the street came the Barton Leigh delivery wagon. Clop-clop! A man jumped out, dumped an iron anchor to the pavement, hurried along the street, turned away, turned back again, came towards them with a long square box in his hand.
“You’ll have to wait a minute,” Basil was calling wildly. “It can’t make any difference. I’ll dress in the library. Look here, if you’re a friend of mine, you’ll wait a minute.” He stepped out on the porch. “Hey, El, I’ve just got my—got to change my clothes. You can wait a minute, can’t you?”
The spark of a cigarette flushed in the darkness as El spoke to the chauffeur; the quivering car came to rest with a sigh and the skies filled suddenly with stars.
III
Once again the fair—but differing from the fair of the afternoon as a girl in the daytime differs from her radiant presentation of herself at night. The substance of the cardboard booths and plaster palaces was gone, the forms remained. Outlined in lights, these forms suggested things more mysterious and entrancing than themselves, and the people strolling along the network of little Broadways shared this quality, as their pale faces singly and in clusters broke the half darkness.
The boys hurried to their rendezvous, finding the girls in the deep shadow of the Temple of Wheat. Their forms had scarcely merged into a group when Basil became aware that something was wrong. In growing apprehension, he glanced from face to face and, as the introductions were made, he realized the appalling truth—the younger sister was, in point of fact, a fright, squat and dingy, with a bad complexion brooding behind a mask of cheap pink powder and a shapeless mouth that tried ceaselessly to torture itself into the mould of charm.
In a daze he heard Riply’s girl say, “I don’t know whether I ought to go with you. I had a sort of date with another fellow I met this afternoon.”
Fidgeting, she looked up and down the street, while Riply, in astonishment and dismay, tried to take her arm.
“Come on,” he urged. “Didn’t I have a date with you first?”
“But I didn’t know whether you’d come or not,” she said perversely.
Elwood and the two sisters added their entreaties.
“Maybe I could go on the Ferris wheel,” she said grudgingly, “but not the Old Mill. This fellow would be sore.”
Riply’s confidence reeled with the blow; his mouth fell ajar, his hand desperately pawed her arm. Basil stood glancing now with agonized politeness at his own girl, now at the others, with an expression of infinite reproach. Elwood alone was successful and content.
“Let’s go on the Ferris wheel,” he said impatiently. “We can’t stand here all night.”
At the ticket booth the recalcitrant Olive hesitated once more, frowning and glancing about as if she still hoped Riply’s rival would appear.
But when the swooping cars came to rest she let herself be persuaded in, and the three couples, with their troubles, were hoisted slowly into the air.
As the car rose, following the imagined curve of the sky, it occurred to Basil how much he would have enjoyed it in other company, or even alone, the fair twinkling beneath him with new variety, the velvet quality of the darkness that is on the edge of light and is barely permeated by its last attenuations. But he was unable to hurt anyone whom he thought of as an inferior. After a minute he turned to the girl beside him.
“Do you live in St. Paul or Minneapolis?” he inquired formally.
“St. Paul. I go to Number 7 School.” Suddenly she moved closer. “I bet you’re not so slow,” she encouraged him.
He put his arm around her shoulder and found it warm. Again they reached the top of the wheel and the sky stretched out overhead, again they lapsed down through gusts of music from remote calliopes. Keeping his eyes turned carefully away, Basil pressed her to him, and as they rose again into darkness, leaned and kissed her cheek.
The significance of the contact stirred him, but out of the corner of his eye he saw her face—he was thankful when a gong struck below and the machine settled slowly to rest.
The three couples were scarcely reunited outside when Olive uttered a yelp of excitement.
“There he is!” she cried. “That Bill Jones I met this afternoon—that I had the date with.”
A youth of their own age was approaching, stepping like a circus pony and twirling, with the deftness of a drum major, a small rattan cane. Under the cautious alias, the three boys recognized a friend and contemporary—none other than the fascinating Hubert Blair.
He came nearer. He greeted them all with a friendly chuckle. He took off his cap, spun it, dropped it, caught it, set it jauntily on the side of his head.
“You’re a nice one,” he said to Olive. “I waited here fifteen minutes this evening.”
He pretended to belabour her with the cane; she giggled with delight. Hubert Blair possessed the exact tone that all girls of fourteen, and a somewhat cruder type of grown women, find irresistible. He was a gymnastic virtuoso and his figure was in constant graceful motion; he had a jaunty piquant nose, a disarming laugh and a shrewd talent for flattery. When he took a piece of toffee from his
