HOSTILITIES
Afterwards, looking back upon those early days at St. Timothy’s,
David sometimes wondered whether he had possessed any individuality
whatever. It seemed to him that he had been merely a submerged unit
that had brief periods of consciousness,――of homesickness, of pleasure,
of suffering,――but that for the most part was swept along on its
curiously insensate way. He remembered the sharpness of contrast
between the day when he first saw St. Timothy’s and the day when the
school formally opened――the quiet, depopulated aspect of one and the
bustling and populous activity of the other. From that opening day life
seemed to flow in currents all about him and to drag him on with it,
passive, bewildered sometimes, sometimes struggling, sometimes swimming
blithely, but always in a current that bore him on and on. Each morning
it began, with the streams of boys flowing at the same hour toward the
same spot, from the dormitories to the chapel; then from the chapel
to the schoolroom; finally from the schoolroom back to the dormitories
again; afterwards to the playgrounds, where they trickled off into a
lot of separate bubbling little springs, only to be sluiced together
again at the distant ringing of a bell and sent streaming back to the
school.
Gradually David made friends; gradually, too, he came into hostile
relations with certain fellows. Chief among his friends was another
new boy and fifth-former, Clarence Monroe, whom he sat next to at
table. They were, as it happened, the only new boys at that table,
and their newness might of itself have bound them together. But they
quickly discovered sympathetic qualities――love of reading and of the
same authors, keenness for baseball and for track athletics, and, in
the circumstances most uniting of all, kindred antipathies. For the
sixth-formers at the table, of whom there were several, seemed to feel
that their sanctity was invaded by the two “new kids” and were disposed
to be offish and censorious. One of them in particular, Hubert Henshaw,
who sat opposite David, made himself disagreeable. He was apparently a
leader in certain ways.
“The glass of fashion and the mould of form,” commented Monroe
satirically to David. They were reading Shakespeare in the English
class, and David replied:
“Yes, perfumed like a milliner. I think it’s all right for a fellow to
keep anything up his sleeve except his handkerchief.”
“I always feel there’s something wrong with a fellow that always has
his socks match his necktie,” said Monroe.
But though they indulged themselves thus freely in shrewd comment
when they were alone together and revenged themselves in imagination
by such criticism for the slights and indignities put upon them, they
could not resent effectively the treatment that Henshaw and, under
his leadership, the others administered to them. There were frequent
comments on the ignoble character of the fifth form and the scrubby
quality of its new kids. Henshaw occasionally expressed the opinion
that the school was deteriorating: “There was no such rabble of new
kids when we were young.” He went on one day to say, looking meanwhile
over David’s head: “Many of them even seem not to have decent clothes.
Has any one seen more than two or three new kids with the slightest
pretense to gentility?”
David recognized the thrust at him and his clothes and said, “I’ve seen
one sixth-former with plenty of pretense.”
It was not a smart retort, but it caused the blood to gather in
Henshaw’s forehead, and for the time being it silenced him. But the
episode rankled in David’s mind. It was the first intimation he had
received that the discrepancies of which he himself had been aware
between his dress and that of most of the fellows had been noticed by
the others. No one but Henshaw had been unkind enough to comment; even
Henshaw’s friends at the table had looked uncomfortable when he made
the remark; but David, thinking of the pains and the careful thought
and the enforced economy of expenditure with which his mother had
assisted him to purchase his clothes, and of the satisfaction that she
had taken in their appearance, was wounded not merely in his pride but
in his affection. From that moment he hated Henshaw.
It disappointed him to learn, as by observation he soon did learn, that
Henshaw, though a sixth-former, was a friend of Wallace’s. They were
often together, walking from the dormitory to the chapel or lounging
in the dormitory hall. Their intimacy was explained to David when one
evening while he was sitting in the hall waiting for the dinner bell
Wallace came up and said:
“Hello, Ives; my cousin, Huby Henshaw, tells me that you come from my
town. I wish I’d known it earlier.”
He seated himself beside David and continued with cheerful geniality:
“How are you getting on? I know you are a shark in lessons, of course;
all right otherwise?”
“Pretty fair, thanks.”
“Funny I didn’t know about you till Huby happened to mention it.
Whereabouts do you live――what part of the town? How did you happen to
come here?”
“In a way, because of your father,” David answered. “My father is a
doctor in Rosewood, and he wants me to be a surgeon like yours. He
thought that, since your father came here to school, I had better come
here, too.”
“I must write and tell dad about it: he’ll be awfully pleased. I guess
he’ll think you’re more of a credit to him than I am.”
“Oh, I guess not,” said David. Then, prompted by Wallace’s friendliness,
he went on to tell of his meeting with Dr. Wallace and of hoping that
Wallace would come up to him――just as he had done.
“Dad forgot all about it,” said Wallace. “I’m glad you told me. You
room in the north wing, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I’m in the south. Come and see me sometime.”
Apparently Henshaw had not poisoned Wallace’s mind, whether he had
tried to do so or not, and for his cousin’s sake David was for a little
while more kindly disposed toward Henshaw.
But the era of good feeling could not last. Two days later, as David
and Monroe were passing after breakfast from the dining-room into the
outer hall, Henshaw thrust his way up to them.
“Ives,” he said, “we’ve all got mighty sick of that necktie. Is it the
only one you have?”
“Oh, shut up, Hube!” It was Wallace, at Henshaw’s side, who spoke; even
in the stupefaction of his anger David saw that on Wallace’s face a
look of concern was overspreading its habitual good nature; Wallace was
plucking at his cousin’s sleeve. “Shut up, Hube; you make me tired!”
“If you sat at our table, that necktie would make you tired. What’s the
reason that you never make a change, Ives? Is it your only one?”
David’s eyes were hard and glittering. With a suddenness that startled
every one he gave Henshaw a resounding slap on the cheek with his
open hand. Henshaw staggered from the blow and stood for an instant,
blinking, gathering pugnacity, while his cheek showed the livid marks
of David’s fingers. Before he could retaliate, Mr. Dean was sweeping
the crowd aside and exclaiming in a stern voice, “Henshaw, Ives, what’s
this?”
They both looked at him, silent, equally defiant. David felt that he
could justify himself and that he must not――a feeling that intensified
his bitterness. Why should an act prompted by righteous indignation
disgrace and discredit him before the man who had been ready to
befriend him?
“You may go now.” Mr. Dean’s eyes were as stern as his voice.
The two principals in the row were escorted by a crowd out of the door
and down the steps. At the bottom Henshaw turned and said to David,
“You’ve got to fight me for this.”
“It will be a pleasure,” David answered bitterly.
Meanwhile Wallace and Monroe had remained behind, close to Mr. Dean.
Wallace was the first to speak.
“Mr. Dean,” he said, “I hope you won’t report Ives. He simply had to
slap Huby’s face.”
“Why?”
“Huby insulted him.”
“Henshaw’s always insulting him,” broke in Monroe. “At the table he’s
always saying nasty things. Ives couldn’t stand it any longer, Mr.
Dean.”
“What was the remark that provoked the blow?”
Wallace repeated it as he remembered it; Monroe’s version was
essentially the same.
“I am glad to have your evidence,” said Mr. Dean. “However, there is no
question that Ives infringed the rules, and for that he will have to be
punished.”
“It isn’t fair!” protested Monroe.
“Possibly not. Sometimes it is necessary to be unfair in the interests
of discipline. At any rate, you both may feel that you have done Ives
and me a service by telling me the facts in the case.”
Wallace and Monroe alike wondered what the service had been when
after chapel they heard David’s name read out on the list of moral
delinquents for the day: “Ives, disorder in dormitory, one sheet.” That
meant an hour of work that afternoon on Latin lines.
David, hearing it, flushed with mortification. So Mr. Dean had chosen
to judge him harshly. It was natural enough; so far as Mr. Dean had
been aware, there were no mitigating circumstances.
His thoughts wandered from his books that morning. He continued to
make creditable recitations when called on, but at other times he did
his work listlessly and with many pauses. He was not afraid to fight
Henshaw; he wanted to fight him; he wanted to administer a punishment
more severe than that one resounding slap on the face. And yet he
hated fighting; he had never engaged in a fight at the high school; he
remembered the most savage fight there that he had ever seen, how he
had stood by, fascinated and yet disgusted, too, by the blazing fury
in the combatants’ eyes, their dishevelment, their blood-marked faces,
the animal wrath with which they mauled and grunted and battered. He
had been disgusted by it all, by his own interest in the spectacle, by
the gloating eyes of the other bystanders. It revolted him now to think
of presenting such a spectacle himself; and yet he knew that unless
Henshaw came to him and apologized he would fight him as long as either
of them could stand.
In the five minutes’ intermission before the Latin class Wallace and
Monroe came and told him of their interview with Mr. Dean. That cheered
him; so did Wallace’s remark: “Henshaw’s my cousin, but he makes me
awfully tired at times. I’m with you and not with him in this.”
At the end of the Latin recitation when David was going out Mr. Dean
said, “Ives, one moment, please.” David stopped while the master
gathered up books and exercises. “If you’re going up to the dormitory,
I’ll walk along with you,” said Mr. Dean. And as they walked along the
corridor he asked, “Where did you get your feeling for the language?”
“For Latin? I didn’t know I had it.”
“Oh, yes, you have, to quite a marked degree. I hope that you’ll
continue to cultivate the language――not, like so many, abandon it at
the first opportunity. There are very few persons nowadays who read
Latin for pleasure――with pleasure. You will be able to do it if you
keep on, for you have the feeling for the language. It will help you in
acquiring other languages.”
They passed out of the door, and then Mr. Dean said abruptly:
“No doubt it seems harsh to you that I should be punishing you alone
for the disorder this morning. Well, discipline often must stand on
technicalities. Yours was the only visible breach; so you have to
suffer. I want to say, however, that I realize there are occasions
when self-respect, to vindicate itself, must defy rules――and this
appears to have been one of those occasions. If Henshaw affords you
the opportunity, I trust you will complete his punishment. Make it
substantial.”
He shook hands with David quite solemnly and then turned aside up the
path leading to his house.
The talk put new cheerfulness into David’s heart. Mr. Dean understood
and sympathized and was still his friend. And fighting was just one of
those unpleasant things that you had to do now and then in life, and
there was no use in letting yourself get disgusted at the thought of it.
He felt so much better in his mind that at the luncheon table he turned
back Henshaw’s scowl with a cheerfully ignoring glance and devoted
himself with unconcern to his friend Monroe until Truesdale, the
sixth-former who sat on his left, said:
“Henshaw wants me to tell you he’ll meet you this afternoon back of the
sawmill at three o’clock.”
“He’ll have to make it half-past three,” David replied. “I have lines
until then.”
Truesdale glanced across the table at Henshaw, who nodded.
“All right; half-past three,” Truesdale said. “Don’t bring a crowd.”
“I shan’t bring anybody but Monroe here,” David answered.
“You fellows will probably collect the whole sixth form,” said Monroe,
whose pugnacity was roused even more than David’s.
“Don’t get excited, little one,” replied Truesdale. “All we care about
is to see fair play.”
After luncheon Monroe walked with David to the study building, where
David for an hour was to perform his task of penmanship.
“Are you pretty good with your fists?” Monroe asked.
“I have no special reason to think so,” David answered. “But I guess I
can hit as hard as he can.”
“If you’re not much on boxing, you’ll have to stand up to him and
take what you get until you can put in enough good cracks to finish
him.” Monroe spoke with a certain satisfaction in the prospect of a
sanguinary encounter. He was a freckled-faced, red-haired, snub-nosed
boy; his blue eyes were sparkling and snapping with expectancy.
“I’m not worrying much,” David answered. “He may lick me or I may
lick him, but either way I guess he will regret having brought it on
himself. And that’s the main thing.”
“Sure,” said Monroe. “But lick him.”
They parted at the door of the study. Monroe assured David that he
would meet him there at a little before half-past three o’clock.
When David finally emerged, he found Monroe waiting outside and Wallace
again passing a ball with the rector’s daughter.
“I’ve got to stop now, Ruth; I have a date,” Wallace said.
She put the ball into the pocket of her leather coat and drew off her
glove. Then she greeted David with a nod and a smile.
“You know Ives, don’t you, Ruth? And Monroe?” Wallace performed the
belated introduction.
“Oh, yes, I know everybody.” She shook hands with each of them. “Your
name’s Clarence, and yours is David. Oh, don’t you want to have a game
of scrub?”
She looked from one to another with hopeful, boyish eyes. Wallace was
the ready-tongued one of the three. “Sorry, Ruth, but we have a date to
go for a walk――going to meet some fellows in the woods.”
“Oh!” Her voice was regretful. “Well, good-bye.”
The boys touched their caps to her as she turned away; David glanced
back at her remorsefully.
“She’s a pretty good kid,” Wallace remarked. “Sort of hard luck on her;
there are no other girls of her age round here for her to play with.
She’s very decent about not butting in; fellows can’t always be having
a girl round.”
“No, you bet not,” agreed Monroe, though like David he had cast
sheepish backward glances.
As for David, the sight of the girl had revived the sense of loathing
for the brutalities of battle that Mr. Dean’s cheerful words of
encouragement had aided him temporarily to suppress. He walked on
silently, thinking how that girl would hate him if she knew what he was
about to do. His mood again became one of sullen revengefulness against
Henshaw, whose behavior had forced the situation upon him.
He and his friends entered the pine woods that bordered the pond behind
the gymnasium. Soon they passed beyond sight of the school buildings;
they walked on until they emerged from the quiet woods upon a hillside
crowned with a decrepit apple orchard; they climbed a hill and followed
a path that led them into a thicket of birch and oak; and at last they
came out into an open space behind a disused sawmill. There seven or
eight fellows, among them Henshaw, were waiting.
One of the sixth-formers, Fred Bartlett, who had played end on the
school football team the preceding year, stepped forward.
“I’ve been asked to referee this scrap,” he said. “Any objection, Ives?”
David shook his head.
“Two-minute rounds. Get ready now, both of you; strip.”
* * * * *
Ruth had stood with a puzzled look in her eyes gazing after David and
Wallace and Monroe as they entered the path into the woods. A few
minutes before, a group of her sixth-form friends had passed that way
and to her friendly inquiry whither they were bound had, like Wallace
and Monroe, returned vague, evasive answers. On an afternoon ideal for
games it seemed to Ruth incomprehensible that so many fellows should
be going for a walk. She had not been brought up in a boarding-school
without acquiring wisdom in the ways of boys, and when another group
of fifth-formers slipped by and entered the path into the woods her
suspicions were aroused.
Harry Carson, captain of the school eleven and the most influential and
popular fellow in St. Timothy’s, came sauntering down from the upper
school with his roommate, John Porter. They took off their caps as
they passed Ruth and then turned into the path that all the others had
followed.
Ruth formed a sudden, courageous resolve.
“O Harry!” she called. “Won’t you wait a moment, please?”
Carson turned and came back toward her, and she advanced to meet him.
“Why is everybody going into the woods this afternoon?”
“Is every one?” said Carson.
“Yes, I think it must be that there’s going to be a fight. Isn’t that
it, Harry?”
“What put such an idea as that into your head?”
“I just feel it, and I know it from the way you ask that question. I
think a fight is perfectly horrid. Won’t you stop it?”
“Sometimes when there’s bad blood between two fellows the best thing is
to let them fight it out.”
“Who are the fellows?”
“It would hardly be fair for me to tell.”
“I suppose it wouldn’t. But fighting seems such a stupid and senseless
way of settling a difference. And it’s just as likely to settle it the
wrong way as the right way. I wish you’d stop this fight, Harry.”
“I haven’t any authority to stop it.”
“They wouldn’t fight if you told them they weren’t to do it. Why, they
wouldn’t fight if even I told them they weren’t to do it!” cried Ruth
with sudden conviction. Her eyes flashed as she added: “If you won’t
give me your word that you’ll stop it, I’ll go into the woods myself
and find those boys and stop them.”
“No, that wouldn’t do at all, Ruth,” said Carson anxiously.
“I will, unless you promise.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
“Good for you! And do hurry!”
Carson turned away and rejoined his companion, to whom he reported the
conversation.
“The girl’s more or less right,” said Porter. “Henshaw ought to be made
by the crowd to apologize to Ives; it oughtn’t to be necessary for Ives
to fight him. I’m with you in what ever you do.”
Carson and Porter came into the open space behind the sawmill just as
the two combatants, stripped to the waist, stood up to face each other.
Carson broke rudely through the circle of eager onlookers and shoved
his heavy bulk between the two gladiators.
“It’s all off,” he said, addressing Henshaw rather more than David.
“If you fellows have so much energy and fight to get rid of get out
and play football. One of you owes the other an apology, and he knows
mighty well that he does. When he makes it there will be no occasion
for anything further.”
“Oh, let them go to it, Harry!” cried a disappointed spectator. “It’ll
do them good.”
“I’ll fight anybody that tries to make them fight,” replied Carson
belligerently, and the crowd laughed. “I’ll fight them if they try to
fight,” he added. “And I’ll say that one of these two fellows, if he
doesn’t apologize to the other for his insulting remarks, deserves a
licking――whether he gets it or not.”
David spoke up crisply, “I have nothing to apologize for.”
There was a moment’s silence, and then Henshaw said in a rather subdued
voice: “I have. I beg your pardon, Ives. I _was_ insulting, and you had
a right to resent it.”
David put out his hand, Henshaw took it, and Carson administered to
each of them a loud and stinging clap on the bare back, which drew an
“Ow!” from Henshaw and a delighted guffaw from the crowd.
The two participants in the bloodless encounter put on their clothes,
the meeting broke up, and in groups of twos and threes the fellows took
their way back to the school.
Ruth came out of the rectory as David and Monroe and Wallace were going
by.
“Why, you weren’t gone very long on your walk, were you?” she said.
“Well, no,” Wallace answered. “We decided we’d do something else, after
all.”
At that moment Carson and a group of sixth-form friends, among them
Henshaw, came up.
“I have the honor to report, Ruth,” said Carson, “that I fulfilled
orders. I am the great pacificator.” He suddenly grabbed Henshaw by the
collar with his right hand and David by the collar with his left. “I
have the honor to restore to you one Huby Henshaw of the sixth form and
one David Ives of the fifth, unscathed, unscratched, unharmed.”
“Good boy!” exclaimed Ruth. Her eyes sparkled with amusement, laughter
rose from the crowd, and David and Henshaw stood blushing and grinning
foolishly.
“You certainly do look like a pair of sillies,” said Ruth. “But you
might be looking even worse――and you’ve got me as well as Harry Carson
to thank that you aren’t. Come in now, and I’ll give you all some tea.”