A KINDLED AMBITION
WESTCOTT’S was in some ways a bit old-fashioned. Holidays were
grudgingly given, visitors were not suffered to intrude on recitations,
and every school day was made a working day, with enforced privileges on
Saturdays if the week’s work was not satisfactorily done. Scholastic
flummery, the advertising quackery of shows and visitors’ days and
special programmes, found no favor with the authorities. If any
exception is to be made to this general rule, it must apply to the day
on which school closed for the Christmas holidays, when for half an hour
at the close of recitations the boys themselves took charge of the
schoolroom, and celebrated in their own way their approaching liberty
and their loyalty to the school.
Even here the programme was very simple. When the twelve o’clock gong
sounded, the whole school assembled in the big room. Old Westcottites
from college poured in, thronging the wide doorway of the library, and
circling the end of the schoolroom in a long line. A representative of
the first class came forward, and in a little speech, delivered usually
with a flushed face and in a faint, agitated voice, presented to the
school a gift which should be a permanent reminder of the affection and
esteem of the outgoing class. Mr. Westcott then made a response, which
was followed sometimes by a few words from some teacher. After this
various boys chosen from the managing class stepped forward and led
cheers for the school, for the individual teachers, and for the athletic
teams. Then old boys, if any were bold enough, or unable to resist the
pressure put upon them, took their turn, and exhorted the school or
praised it, as inspiration (or their confusion) led them. No boy who was
present on the day when three captains of Harvard teams and two
class-day marshals—all old Westcottites—followed each other to the
platform, will soon forget the impression made by those stalwart
figures, intelligent faces, and sincere if inartistic speeches. Not the
bishop nor the learned professor nor the governor himself could so stir
the hearts of the school. These college men were authorities, men who
had achieved, heroes within the range of every boy’s admiration.
This year, only one of these representatives from the upper world was
booked to address the school, but as he was no less a personage than
captain of the Varsity crew, he counted in general estimation tenfold.
Roger Hardie, being in the second class, played spectator and common
soldier in the cheering battalion. Mr. Westcott’s speech and Mr. Cary’s
left him rather cold; he had heard these gentlemen many times before in
various forms of discourse from cautious praise to unreserved
condemnation. But when Deering was demanded, and in response a tall,
broad-shouldered, deep-chested, bronzed young man emerged from the
library and pushed forward through a tumult of welcome, Roger’s heart
leaped to greet him.
For half a minute Deering stood with his hand on the desk, waiting for
the din to subside. Roger fixed his eyes upon him, and in an intense
stare drank in an impression of the man. He was quietly dressed, his
necktie subdued, his trousers—Dunn might perhaps have noticed—not
absolutely fresh from the tailor’s goose. But Deering was one for whom
clothes could do little. Such bigness, honesty, cleanness,
determination, and withal such fresh unconquerable strength of youth, no
smart costume could adorn. In some manner he suggested Talbot—Talbot as
he might be four years hence, when his body had reached its growth and
the maturing influences of college life had tamed his explosive
violence.
Deering’s speech was addressed to the first class. When the boys before
him reached college, he said, they would find certain men doing all
sorts of things that they’d better not be doing, wasting their money and
time and strength, and thinking that they were cutting a great figure.
There were plenty of such fellows hanging round the college, who were of
no use to the college or to themselves. They make a great mistake. No
one cares anything about them, and they don’t make good. The fellow who
has principles and tries to live up to them, who is willing to work hard
and keep faced in the right direction, is the man who is respected,
whether he makes a name for himself or not.
“You’ve got to mean right and work right,” he said in closing. “You
can’t mean right unless you have principles to follow, and the only way
to work right is to work hard. Here in school is the place to make a
good start. I don’t need to say anything about your studies, for your
teachers will see to that, but in your athletics, unless there’s been a
big change since my day, there’s room for improvement. You want to play
fair and play like gentlemen, but play hard. Give the best of yourselves
to your practice as well as to your matches. Don’t fool, and don’t
shirk, and don’t quit. And when you come to college, don’t let any one
persuade you that the ideals and moral standards you’ve learned here
will have to be changed.”
Had the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric from across the Charles been
present in the Westcott schoolroom that morning, he would have listened
patronizingly and given the speaker a passing grade in consideration of
his earnestness and good intentions. Had the professor spoken in
Deering’s place, the boys would have closed their ears to his careful
sentences and mentally marked him F—flat failure. They voted Deering A,
and after their reserved fashion, assented to his maxims and treasured
up his words. Even Dunn had visions of a time coming—in the dim future,
of course—when he should throw off his indolence and self-indulgence,
be a “good boy” and a grind, work like a Trojan in school and out, and
win back the ground that he had lost. When it came to baseball, he could
show them a few things!
As for Roger Hardie, Deering’s exhortation, and even more Deering’s
personality, was as a match applied to tinder. His zeal took fire
immediately. If the rowing men were like Deering, if rowing made such
men, rowing was the thing for him! If honest, serious work profited at
all in this untried sport in which experience was held to be so
important, Roger would give that work ungrudgingly as long as his
presence was tolerated on the squad. This resolve sent him to the
gymnasium to exercise every day during the Christmas recess, when, save
for himself and Mike and two smaller urchins, Adams’s was bereft of
boys. It forced him to look upon himself as, in a fashion, consecrated
to a special ambition, none the less wholesome and potent because
cherished in secret. It made it easier for him to keep faith with his
parents and his own conscience in the presence of the insidious
temptations to which he, in common with all boys of his age, was
subjected.
The tide of boys flooded back to school on the second of January, noisy
with reminiscences of good times enjoyed. Talbot came from a camp on the
shore of Cape Cod, where he had been shooting with Trask; Ben Tracy from
Montreal. Dunn had spent his freedom in New York, where he had “been to
something every night and had the highest old kind of a time.” The
anecdotes of his experiences furnished him amusement for a week; his
listeners tired of them in a much shorter time. Aside from these
anecdotes, Dunn brought back little that was new from his vacation,
certainly nothing so beneficial to himself or the school as an earnest
purpose. He continued to slide downhill with careless content, finding
specious excuses to present to teachers for classroom failures, and
flattering himself that he was playing a grand rôle in the eyes of his
mates as a jaunty, devil-may-care loafer.
The winter term in all schools is sacred to work. The boys at
Westcott’s, under pressure at home and in school, on the whole did their
full stint with faithfulness and good-will. But there was no lack of
distraction abroad or fun at school. Outside were the official
amusements at Adams’s, skating at the Country Club, occasional dancing
parties, lectures for the intellectual, theatre for the frivolous, and
jolly visiting among friends for all. At school, some petty excitement
was always to be found. A lively recitation has its interest for a
keen-witted boy, especially if it exhibits a Dunn trying to palm off an
old excuse or a Redfield to originate a new blunder. Some one was
usually in trouble, and the trouble of a school-mate, if not too
serious, is always interesting to the bystanders. And there were
occasions when the amusement was not wholly innocent.
The great fault with the Westcott lads was their thoughtlessness. They
had never known the sting of poverty, nor suffered from the want of
anything which it was at all desirable that they should have. Some of
them had feeble sense of the sacredness of property; a thing that could
be bought by a small requisition on their pocket-money possessed in
their eyes slight value. When Wilmot unscrewed an electric-light bulb in
the lower hall and flung it the whole length of the play room to smash
into a hundred pieces against the brick wall, he was simply yielding to
a reckless impulse of fun. He would have taken his punishment without
complaint if he had been caught, and he would have confessed the deed
honestly if he had been questioned; but he had no idea that he was
stealing. When Cable dropped a new stiff hat at the cloak-room door, and
half a dozen rascals immediately kicked it into tatters, they thought
they were having fun with Cable—until after an interview with Mr.
Westcott. If a book was left about the halls,—the owner had no business
to drop his books around,—some one was quite likely to use it as a
missile on his way out. Talbot and Hardie and Harrison and others of the
older boys regarded such an act as “kiddish”; Wilmot would commit it
because of uncontrolled recklessness, Dunn because he was a fool.
It was the laboratory at the top of the building that offered to
heedless spirits the greatest temptation. Here both the chemistry and
the physics classes performed their experiments and made their
recitations. Mr. Cary, the instructor, was neither incompetent nor a
weakling; but he couldn’t be in the laboratory all the time nor in all
parts of it at the same time. Interesting experiments were tried that
had no place in the text-book. For two weeks a jar hidden in the corner
served as a receptacle for odds and ends of chemicals, and was visited
surreptitiously every day by various members of the class, curious to
see what new color it had taken on. Reeves discovered that a cent could
be silvered by dipping it in nitric acid, then in mercury, and then, for
an instant, in the acid again. Thereupon a mania for silvering objects
suddenly developed which had to be repressed by official order. With a
piece of glass tubing drawn to a point and attached by a rubber hose to
a faucet, Trask found that he could throw a fine jet of water to a
considerable distance. He used to train this with great effect on
persons standing yards away, the spray being invisible but very
distinctly felt. It struck Hardie one day in the back of the neck just
above his collar, as he was standing beside Mr. Cary’s desk. He couldn’t
turn round or dodge the stream, for Mr. Cary was looking over his
note-book, and any movement would have betrayed the offenders. So he
stood helpless, furtively swabbing with his handkerchief at the back of
his head, but failing with all his efforts to dam the stream that
trickled down his back.
Impunity encourages. One day at recess, some scapegrace made an
obnoxious mixture in an open dish by means of iron sulphide and
hydrochloric acid, and fled for his life, leaving the laboratory door
open. The fumes descended the stairways and reached the noses of
innocent sufferers below. Mr. Westcott and Mr. Cary arrived at the
laboratory simultaneously, hot on the scent, and took counsel together.
Later in the day Mr. Westcott called the laboratory classes into his
room and demanded the culprit. No one volunteering, he explained the
danger and wrong of fooling in the laboratory, and declared that he
should punish severely any further misdemeanor, even if it were
necessary to inflict the penalty on the whole class.
As Mr. Westcott was not given to idle threats, there was seriousness on
the top floor—for a time.
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