BOBS
It was the noon half-hour at Marston High, and boys and girls were
crowding into the little bakery familiarly known among them as the
“eat-house.”
Louise Markham and Jacquette had been lucky enough to get a seat at one
of the three oilcloth-covered tables, but by far the larger number,
with their sandwiches in their hands, were good-naturedly jostling for
standing-room.
Jacquette had decided that day, after a few weeks of single-handed
effort, to take Louise into her confidence about the bargain with Aunt
Sula, and Louise’s hearty response had been an immense relief.
“Your aunt’s exactly right!” she had declared. “She’s gone straight to
the weak points of Sigma Pi. Talk about a sorority helping scholarship!
The only thing that has saved my scholarship at Marston is the fact
that my mother wouldn’t let me go Sigma Pi until I was a junior, and,
even since then, it has been hard work to keep sorority business from
interfering with my school work. I believe any girl that gets deep
in sorority doings the first year of high school will have trouble
straightening things out and doing well with her studies the rest of
the time, and I want you to tell your Aunt Sula, Jacquette, that I’ll
stand by and work for every reform she asked for. I can propose things,
being a senior, that the girls wouldn’t take from you, and I believe we
can accomplish something.”
“Oh, Louise, you’re such a splendid----” Jacquette began, but Louise
nudged her to be quiet. Two boys had slipped into places which had
been vacated on the opposite side of the table, and, as Jacquette
looked up, she found herself gazing into the blue eyes of Bobs Drake.
Bobs had scarcely seated himself and ordered a glass of milk from the
distracted young waitress, who was answering wild calls for “redhots!”
and “soup!” from all directions at once, before the boys and girls
began to swarm about him.
“I hear you’ve gone into training, now, Bobs, just like a ’varsity
man,” began one of the boys. “They’re telling around that you live on
birdseed and mush, and take long runs in the early morning. Is that
right?”
“He wouldn’t come over to the frat house, last night, anyway,” put in
Lawrence Beach. “I understand he’s started going to bed at six, now.”
“Then we’ll have to go around and serenade him,” proposed Rex Morton.
“We’ll give him, ‘Oh, does it not seem hard to you?’” He hummed the
first line, and the crowd of boys and girls took it up:
“Oh, does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play--
I have to go to bed by day?”
they sang plaintively, while Bobs sat sipping his glass of milk with a
good-humoured smile on his sunburned face.
As the joking went on, Jacquette knew, whether she looked at Bobs or
not, that his eyes were almost constantly on her. She wondered why. It
flattered and embarrassed her at the same time, and she was glad and
sorry when Louise proposed to go. A moment later, in brushing past him
on her way out, she was astonished to have him slip a folded note into
her hand.
“Louise, he’s written something to me!” she exclaimed, as soon as they
reached the street. “Let’s see what it says.”
She unfolded the paper and together the two girls read:
“Will you let me walk home with you after school?
“Bobs.”
“Do I know him well enough? Say yes, Louise!” Jacquette demanded.
“Blanche Gross introduced him to me the day after that Indian
performance and I’ve talked with him in the halls some, since then,
but I never dreamed of his giving me a second thought, when he’s so
popular, and I’m just a freshman. Blanche says he has the dandiest
morals of any boy she knows. What do you think, Louise?”
“Oh, he’s nice. I’ve known him all my life and his mother is one of our
best friends, but he’s not a Beta Sig, and Quis isn’t going to like it
if you choose friends outside of his frat.”
“H’m! Quis doesn’t own me. Besides, I have to treat all fraternities
alike, according to the bargain with Aunt Sula,” Jacquette declared,
virtuously, and immediately began to compose her reply to Bobs.
That reply consumed a large part of the study-hour following. The
momentous questions involved were: first, how to begin; second, what to
say; third, how to end.
If Bobs were any other boy, it would be right to call him “Mr.,” but no
one in the school said “Mr. Drake.” Everyone said “Bobs.” His real name
was Robin Sidney Drake, but that was absurd for Bobs! Besides, he had
signed himself “Bobs.”
Meantime a procession of Aunt Sula’s admonitions in regard to writing
notes to boys haunted Jacquette like ghosts, and made her tear up
effort after effort. When the last was finally completed it read as
follows:
“Bobs:
“Yes.
“Jacquette Willard.”
She laid this circumspect epistle on Bobs’s desk as she passed out of
the study-room to her English class, and two minutes later Blanche
Gross, acting the part of a Sigma Pi guardian, came hurrying after, and
sitting down beside her, said reprovingly:
“You shouldn’t write notes to Bobs Drake, Jacquette. The minute you
were out of the room he showed it to Rex Morton, and they both laughed.”
“Let them!” Jacquette returned, flushing. “There was nothing in it that
the whole world mightn’t see. That’s the only kind of note I ever write
to boys, and I didn’t learn the habit from Sigma Pi Epsilon, either!”
Then, having heaped her secret vexation with Bobs and Rex on the head
of Blanche, who was the most prolific writer of notes in the whole
sorority, Jacquette proceeded to give conspicuous attention to her
English teacher.
It was an eventful moment when she walked down the street from Marston
with the broad-shouldered captain of the football team at her side, and
Jacquette hugely enjoyed the sensation she knew she was causing among
the girls. Then they turned the corner, and, without giving her time to
puzzle longer, Bobs began abruptly:
“I suppose you’re wondering what I want, and I’ll tell you, to begin,
that I never would have written you that note if I hadn’t believed that
you’re absolutely square.”
If Jacquette had heard herself called a princess among women she could
not have felt more pleased--and her face showed it.
“Of course you know,” Bobs continued, “that our team has won every game
it has played against any other school this fall?”
“I think I do!” she flashed, saucily.
“And you know that the next game is the last of the season--the one
that decides the championship for the year.” Bobs cleared his throat,
and Jacquette waited.
“Well, of course you know that, according to the rules at Marston, if a
football man’s average for the week falls below on the day before the
game, he’s debarred from playing. You knew that, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
She wondered what was coming.
“The point is this: I’ve had a hard pull to keep above in my studies
and keep the team in shape, too, and I haven’t always done it, either.
You probably know that I missed playing in two games this season,
because I was below, those two weeks. But, such marks as I have had,
I’ve earned myself. I haven’t had credit for a stroke of work that was
done by anyone else.”
“Of course not!”
He looked at her curiously. “It’s a common thing, you know, for the
fellows on the team to have someone else do their studying during the
season,” he explained, defensively. “But I’ve stood against it, and
they all know it. That’s the reason I’m in such an awkward box, now.
The fact is, I’m below in my English this week, and, besides all the
rest of the work, there are two themes lacking, and, to make it as bad
as it could be, one of those themes is a sonnet!”
“But Bobs, a sonnet--that’s easy!”
“That’s what I’ve heard about you,” he answered, hurriedly. “They say
you can write poetry as easy as breathing. Now, you wouldn’t believe it
could be done, but I’ve managed, all through my high school course, to
steer clear of sonnets. I believe it’s a put-up job, anyway, requiring
so much extra work this week. I have English with Miss Breckinridge,
you know, and she’s down on football. She thinks she can keep me out
of the game by piling on a sonnet, after everything else. Well, she’s
cute! I give up. I can’t write a sonnet.”
“Oh, Bobs!” Jacquette stared at him in blank dismay. “You’re captain!
You must play in the championship game!”
“Then will you write the sonnet?”
Jacquette stood still and met his honest blue eyes. No one who knew
Bobs could help trusting him. As far as she could see, he was not
ashamed of having asked the question.
She knew that it was a common thing among the girls to prepare lessons
for their boy friends on the team, but, somehow, it had never entered
her mind that she could do such a thing. Suddenly the thought that
she--Jacquette Willard--might gain or lose Bobs Drake the chance to
play in the championship game, took away her breath.
“But it wouldn’t be your work, Bobs,” she uttered, mechanically, while
the sweet flattery of the situation tugged at her principles.
“What do I care?” he protested. “I’m not going to write sonnets for a
living. I’m going to be an engineer. Oh, I know how you feel about it,
because my principles are just the same, but this case is an exception.
We wouldn’t be setting a bad example, even, because no one except you
and me need ever know. That’s one reason I asked you; I knew you’d
never tell.”
They had reached Jacquette’s home while he was speaking, and as she
glanced at an upper window, Aunt Sula’s face leaned forward to smile a
welcome.
“Oh, Bobs!” Jacquette cried, reproachfully, then, “you _said_ you
thought I was square!”
“I do!” he answered, stoutly, and after that they argued for a full
half hour, standing there at the foot of the steps in the chill
November day.
The end of it was that Bobs went away with several new ideas about
the conscience of a girl. Not only that; he had promised to burn the
midnight oil, before he slept, over a sonnet which was to be addressed
to past football heroes of Marston High, whose ghosts, Jacquette had
hinted, might be imagined as haunting the assembly-room where their
gloriously-won banners still hung, and where the big mass-meetings were
always held.
It would have been far easier for Jacquette to compose that sonnet on
the spot, than it had been to keep from doing it, and, as she entered
the house she was feeling triumphant over the way she had insisted on
Bobs’s working out his own scheme. Then, before she had laid down her
books, the bell sounded, and, turning, she saw her cousin Marquis on
the threshold.
“Come out and walk around the block with me, Jack,” he demanded. “I
want to see you alone.”
“All right, Quis,” she answered, happily, stopping to give her
white-haired grandfather a hug as he came out of the library to meet
her. “Just sit down a minute, please, while I run upstairs to speak to
Tia. Then I’ll be _à votre service_.”
But, instead of accepting her suggestion, Marquis excused himself to
his grandfather and went out on the steps, where Jacquette found him
a little later, with Clarence Mullen. Marquis had just loaded his own
school-books on top of those Clarence already carried, and was giving a
list of orders in a tone that a master might use with a slave. “After
that,” he was finishing, as Jacquette appeared, “take these books to my
house and wait there till I come, no matter how late it is.”
Jacquette glanced at Clarence with quick understanding. Far from
seeming humiliated, he had an air of new importance as he touched his
hat to her and hurried away.
“So he’s pledged Beta Sig, is he?” she asked, with a smile.
Marquis nodded without speaking, as they went down the steps together.
“I’ve a small grudge against that boy, because you deserted Louise
and me to walk to school with him one morning,” Jacquette went on,
lightly. “He’s been a rival of mine since then. Every time I want to
speak to you, he’s right at your heels. I think you have some sort of
fascination for him, Quis, the way he follows you around.”
“But of course the fact that he has a special admiration for your
cousin doesn’t win him any favour in your eyes,” Quis said, stiffly.
“Of course it does! In fact that’s the only reason I haven’t let
myself take a prejudice against him. Why, Quis!”--turning a surprised
face to him--“what’s the matter?”
But Marquis met her questioning look coldly. “I suppose you haven’t
forgotten that Bobs Drake is an Epsilon Lambda Kappa,” he answered.
There was something irresistibly funny to Jacquette in his solemn way
of pronouncing those three Greek letters, especially as the members of
Bobs’s fraternity were universally known around school as the “Elks.”
In spite of herself, she smiled mischievously as she answered, “No; I
haven’t forgotten.”
“Perhaps that doesn’t mean anything to you,” Marquis went on, severely,
noting the smile. “I’ve heard, before, that girls had no sense of
honour, so probably the fact that the Elks are recognised as good
friends of Kappa Delta, always working to land the best girls in that
sorority, wouldn’t make any difference to you--a Sigma Pi. Of course,
my frat makes it a point to help Sigma Pi, and, naturally, it expects a
little appreciation in return, but that’s not my point, now. How do you
suppose it made me feel to have the other fellows in the frat house,
just now, see you, my own cousin, walk past with a fellow that has
treated me the way Bobs Drake has?”
“Quis, what on earth do you mean?”
“I mean that when he was elected captain he put Ned Woodward on the
team instead of me, just because I’m a Beta Sig and Ned’s an Elk. Yes,
he did! Fraternity prejudice isn’t supposed to rule in the make-up of
a football team, but it got in its work that time. Ned’s no better man
than I am, and most of the fellows will tell you he isn’t as good. Then
Bobs made me his sub. That means I have no chance to play, ever, unless
he falls below in his marks or gets hurt in the game. Haven’t you
caught on to the fact that the reason I could play in those two games,
early in the season, was because Bobs Drake wasn’t above, those weeks?
Do you know that a fellow has to play at least two games and a half, in
order to win his football emblem? Unless I play another half-game with
the team--and there’s precious little hope of it, now--I won’t have a
right to wear the letters of my school on my sweater, this year.”
“But Quis----”
“I tell you, Bobs Drake doesn’t intend I shall have that right. He
thinks I need taking down because I’ve lived abroad, or some such rot.
But he’s hurting himself, all right! Talk about his being the idol of
the school! You wouldn’t think so if you could hear the fellows talk,
down at the Beta Sig house. They won’t get over his slight to me in a
hurry, and, for my part, I never shall. You can choose between Bobs
Drake and me, right here and now, Jacquette. You know the facts. Are
you going to have anything more to do with him?”
Jacquette hesitated an instant, but that instant was too much for
Marquis’s hurt pride. He said something that stung, and she answered
back as sharply as she could. They went around the block, not once, but
five times, before Jacquette finally rushed into the house and up to
Aunt Sula’s room, where she flung herself on the couch in a tempest of
tears.
“Oh, Tia, Tia! Quis is dreadfully angry at me!” she sobbed out. “He has
said such awful things! He has even accused me of coaching Bobs Drake
to keep him above this week, so that he can play in the championship
game and keep Quis out!”