“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 day after a particularly bitter humiliation he went up to his room and cried. He tried to keep out of the way for a while, but it didn’t help. He was accused of sneaking off here and there, as if bent on a series of nefarious errands. Puzzled and wretched, he looked at his face in the glass, trying to discover there the secret of their dislike—in the expression of his eyes, his smile.
He saw now that in certain ways he had erred at the outset—he had boasted, he had been considered yellow at football, he had pointed out people’s mistakes to them, he had showed off his rather extraordinary fund of general information in class. But he had tried to do better and couldn’t understand his failure to atone. It must be too late. He was queered forever.
He had, indeed, become the scapegoat, the immediate villain, the sponge which absorbed all malice and irritability abroad—just as the most frightened person in a party seems to absorb all the others’ fear, seems to be afraid for them all. His situation was not helped by the fact, obvious to all, that the supreme self-confidence with which he had come to St. Regis in September was thoroughly broken. Boys taunted him with impunity who would not have dared raise their voices to him several months before.
This trip to New York had come to mean everything to him—surcease from the misery of his daily life as well as a glimpse into the long-waited heaven of romance. Its postponement for week after week due to his sins—he was constantly caught reading after lights, for example, driven by his wretchedness into such vicarious escapes from reality—had deepened his longing until it was a burning hunger. It was unbearable that he should not go, and he told over the short list of those whom he might get to accompany him. The possibilities were Fat Caspar, Treadway, and Bugs Brown. A quick journey to their rooms showed that they had all availed themselves, of the Wednesday permission to go into Eastchester for the afternoon.
Basil did not hesitate. He had until five o’clock and his only chance was to go after them. It was not the first time he had broken bounds, though the last attempt had ended in disaster and an extension of his confinement. In his room, he put on a heavy sweater—an overcoat was a betrayal of intent—replaced his jacket over it and hid a cap in his back pocket. Then he went downstairs and with an elaborately careless whistle struck out across the lawn for the gymnasium. Once there, he stood for a while as if looking in the windows, first the one close to the walk, then one near the corner of the building. From here he moved quickly, but not too quickly, into a grove of lilacs. Then he dashed around the corner, down a long stretch of lawn that was blind from all windows and, parting the strands of a wire fence, crawled through and stood upon the grounds of a neighbouring estate. For the moment he was free. He put on his cap against the chilly November wind, and set out along the half-mile road to town.
Eastchester was a suburban farming community, with a small shoe factory. The institutions which pandered to the factory workers were the ones patronized by the boys—a movie house, a quick-lunch wagon on wheels known as the Dog and the Bostonian Candy Kitchen. Basil tried the Dog first and happened immediately upon a prospect.
This was Bugs Brown, a hysterical boy, subject to fits and strenuously avoided. Years later he became a brilliant lawyer, but at that time he was considered by the boys of St. Regis to be a typical lunatic because of his peculiar series of sounds with which he assuaged his nervousness all day long.
He consorted with boys younger than himself, who were without the prejudices of their elders, and was in the company of several when Basil came in.
“Who-ee!” he cried. “Ee-ee-ee!” He put his hand over his mouth and bounced it quickly, making a wah-wah-wah sound. “It’s Bossy Lee! It’s Bossy Lee! It’s Boss-Boss-Boss-Boss-Bossy Lee!”
“Wait a minute, Bugs,” said Basil anxiously, half afraid that Bugs would go finally crazy before he could persuade him to come to town. “Say, Bugs, listen. Don’t, Bugs—wait a minute. Can you come up to New York Saturday afternoon?”
“Whe-ee-ee!” cried Bugs to Basil’s distress. “Whee-ee-ee!”
“Honestly, Bugs, tell me, can you? We could go up together if you could go.”
“I’ve got to see a doctor,” said Bugs, suddenly calm. “He wants to see how crazy I am.”
“Can’t you have him see about it some other day?” said Basil without humour.
“Whee-ee-ee!” cried Bugs.
“All right then,” said Basil hastily. “Have you seen Fat Gaspar in town?”
Bugs was lost in shrill noise, but someone had seen Fat: Basil was directed to the Bostonian Candy Kitchen.
This was a gaudy paradise of cheap sugar. Its odour, heavy and sickly and calculated to bung out a sticky sweat upon an adult’s palms, hung suffocatingly over the whole vicinity and met one like a strong moral dissuasion at the door. Inside, beneath a pattern of flies, material as black point lace, a line of boys sat eating heavy dinners of banana splits, maple nut, and chocolate marshmallow nut sundaes. Basil found Fat Gaspar at a table on the side.
Fat Gaspar was at once Basil’s most unlikely and most ambitious quest He was considered a nice fellow—in fact he was so pleasant that he had been courteous to Basil and had spoken to him politely all fall. Basil realized that he was like that to everyone, yet it was just possible that Fat liked him, as people used to in the past, and he was driven desperately to take a chance. But it was undoubtedly a presumption, and as he approached the table and saw the stiffened faces which the other two boys turned towards him, Basil’s hope diminished.
“Say, Fat—” he said, and hesitated. Then he burst forth suddenly. “I’m on bounds, but I ran off because I had to see you. Doctor Bacon told me I could go to New York Saturday if I could get two other boys
