He broke off, furiously embarrassed, and waited. Suddenly the two boys with Fat burst into a shout of laughter.
“Bugs wasn’t crazy enough!”
Fat Gaspar hesitated. He couldn’t go to New York Saturday and ordinarily he would have refused without offending. He had nothing against Basil; nor, indeed, against anybody; but boys have only a certain resistance to public opinion and he was influenced by the contemptuous laughter of the others.
“I don’t want to go,” he said indifferently. “Why do you want to ask me?”
Then, half in shame, he gave a deprecatory little laugh and bent over his ice cream.
“I just thought I’d ask you,” said Basil.
Turning quickly away, he went to the counter and in a hollow and unfamiliar voice ordered a strawberry sundae. He ate it mechanically, hearing occasional whispers and snickers from the table behind. Still in a daze, he started to walk out without paying his check, but the clerk called him back and he was conscious of more derisive laughter.
For a moment he hesitated whether to go back to the table and hit one of those boys in the face, but he saw nothing to be gained. They would say the truth—that he had done it because he couldn’t get anybody to go to New York. Clenching his fists with impotent rage, he walked from the store.
He came immediately upon his third prospect, Treadway. Treadway had entered St. Regis late in the year and had been put in to room with Basil the week before. The fact that Treadway hadn’t witnessed his humiliations of the autumn encouraged Basil to behave naturally towards him, and their relations had been, if not intimate, at least tranquil.
“Hey, Treadway,” he called, still excited from the affair in the Bostonian, “can you come up to New York to a show Saturday afternoon?”
He stopped, realizing that Treadway was in the company of Brick Wales, a boy he had had a fight with and one of his bitterest enemies. Looking from one to the other, Basil saw a look of impatience in Treadway’s face and a faraway expression in Brick Wales’s, and he realized what must have been happening. Treadway, making his way into the life of the school, had just been enlightened as to the status of his roommate. Like Fat Gaspar, rather than acknowledge himself eligible to such an intimate request, he preferred to cut their friendly relations short.
“Not on your life,” he said briefly. “So long.” The two walked past him into the Candy Kitchen.
Had these slights, so much the bitterer for their lack of passion, been visited upon Basil in September, they would have been unbearable. But since then he had developed a shell of hardness which, while it did not add to his attractiveness, spared him certain delicacies of torture. In misery enough, and despair and self-pity, he went the other way along the street for a little distance until he could control the violent contortions of his face. Then, taking a roundabout route, he started back to school.
He reached the adjoining estate, intending to go back the way he had come. Half-way through a hedge, he heard footsteps approaching along the sidewalk and stood motionless, fearing the proximity of masters. Their voices grew nearer and louder; before he knew it he was listening with horrified fascination:
“—so, after he tried Bugs Brown, the poor nut asked Fat Gaspar to go with him and Fat said, «What do you ask me for?» It serves him right if he couldn’t get anybody at all.”
It was the dismal but triumphant voice of Lewis Crum.
III
Up in his room, Basil found a package lying on his bed. He knew its contents and for a long time he had been eagerly expecting it, but such was his depression that he opened it listlessly. It was a series of eight colour reproductions of Harrison Fisher girls “on glossy paper, without printing or advertising matter and suitable for framing.”
The pictures were named Dora, Marguerite, Babette, Lucille, Gretchen, Rose, Katherine, and Mina. Two of them—Marguerite and Rose—Basil looked at, slowly tore up, and dropped in the waste-basket, as one who disposes of the inferior pups from a litter. The other six he pinned at intervals around the room. Then he lay down on his bed and regarded them.
Dora, Lucille, and Katherine were blonde; Gretchen was medium; Babette and Mina were dark. After a few minutes, he found that he was looking oftenest at Dora and Babette and, to a lesser extent, at Gretchen, though the latter’s Dutch cap seemed unromantic and precluded the element of mystery. Babette, a dark little violet-eyed beauty in a tight-fitting hat, attracted him most; his eyes came to rest on her at last.
“Babette,” he whispered to himself—“beautiful Babette.”
The sound of the word, so melancholy and suggestive, like “Vilia” or “I’m happy at Maxim’s” on the phonograph, softened him and, turning over on his face, he sobbed into the pillow. He took hold of the bed rails over his head and, sobbing and straining, began to talk to himself brokenly—how he hated them and whom he hated—he listed a dozen—and what he would do to them when he was great and powerful. In previous moments like these he had always rewarded Fat Gaspar for his kindness, but now he was like the rest Basil set upon him, pummelling him unmercifully, or laughed sneeringly when he passed him blind and begging on the street.
He controlled himself as he heard Treadway come in, but did not move or speak. He listened as the other moved about the room, and after a while became conscious that there was an unusual opening of closets and bureau drawers. Basil turned over, his arm concealing his tear-stained face. Treadway had an armful of shirts in his hand.
“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.
“Good-bye,” he said to Basil, without a ripple of expression on his face.
“Good-bye.”
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
