At the present time no one I know has the slightest desire to
hit Samuel Meredith; possibly this is because a man over fifty
is liable to be rather severely cracked at the impact of a
hostile fist, but, for my part, I am inclined to think that all
his hitable qualities have quite vanished. But it is certain
that at various times in his life hitable qualities were in his
face, as surely as kissable qualities have ever lurked in a
girl's lips.
I'm sure every one has met a man like that, been casually
introduced, even made a friend of him, yet felt he was the sort
who aroused passionate dislike--expressed by some in the
involuntary clinching of fists, and in others by mutterings
about "takin' a poke" and "landin' a swift smash in ee eye." In
the juxtaposition of Samuel Meredith's features this quality was
so strong that it influenced his entire life.
What was it? Not the shape, certainly, for he was a pleasant-looking
man from earliest youth: broad-bowed with gray eyes that
were frank and friendly. Yet I've heard him tell a room full of
reporters angling for a "success" story that he'd be ashamed to
tell them the truth that they wouldn't believe it, that it
wasn't one story but four, that the public would not want to
read about a man who had been walloped into prominence.
It all started at Phillips Andover Academy when he was fourteen.
He had been brought up on a diet of caviar and bell-boys' legs
in half the capitals of Europe, and it was pure luck that his
mother had nervous prostration and had to delegate his education
to less tender, less biassed hands.
At Andover he was given a roommate named Gilly Hood. Gilly was
thirteen, undersized, and rather the school pet. From the
September day when Mr. Meredith's valet stowed Samuel's clothing
in the best bureau and asked, on departing, "hif there was
hanything helse, Master Samuel?" Gilly cried out that the
faculty had played him false. He felt like an irate frog in
whose bowl has been put goldfish.
"Good gosh!" he complained to his sympathetic contemporaries,
"he's a damn stuck-up Willie. He said, 'Are the crowd here
gentlemen?' and I said, 'No, they're boys,' and he said age
didn't matter, and I said, 'Who said it did?' Let him get fresh
with me, the ole pieface!"
For three weeks Gilly endured in silence young Samuel's comments
on the clothes and habits of Gilly's personal friends, endured
French phrases in conversation, endured a hundred half-feminine
meannesses that show what a nervous mother can do to a boy, if
she keeps close enough to him--then a storm broke in the aquarium.
Samuel was out. A crowd had gathered to hear Gilly be wrathful
about his roommate's latest sins.
"He said, 'Oh, I don't like the windows open at night,' he said,
'except only a little bit,'" complained Gilly.
"Don't let him boss you."
"Boss me? You bet he won't. I open those windows, I guess, but
the darn fool won't take turns shuttin' 'em in the morning."
"Make him, Gilly, why don't you?"
"I'm going to." Gilly nodded his head in fierce agreement.
"Don't you worry. He needn't think I'm any ole butler."
"Le's see you make him."
At this point the darn fool entered in person and included the
crowd in one of his irritating smiles. Two boys said, "'Lo,
Mer'dith"; the others gave him a chilly glance and went on talking
to Gilly. But Samuel seemed unsatisfied.
"Would you mind not sitting on my bed?" he suggested politely to
two of Gilly's particulars who were perched very much at ease.
"Huh?"
"My bed. Can't you understand English?"
This was adding insult to injury. There were several comments on
the bed's sanitary condition and the evidence within it of animal
life.
"S'matter with your old bed?" demanded Gilly truculently.
"The bed's all right, but---"
Gilly interrupted this sentence by rising and walking up to
Samuel. He paused several inches away and eyed him fiercely.
"You an' your crazy ole bed," he began. "You an' your crazy---"
"Go to it, Gilly," murmured some one.
"Show the darn fool--"
Samuel returned the gaze coolly.
"Well," he said finally, "it's my bed--"
He got no further, for Gilly hauled off and hit him succinctly in
the nose.
"Yea! Gilly!"
"Show the big bully!"
"Just let him touch you--he'll see!"
The group closed in on them and for the first time in his life
Samuel realized the insuperable inconvenience of being
passionately detested. He gazed around helplessly at the
glowering, violently hostile faces. He towered a head taller
than his roommate, so if he hit back he'd be called a bully and
have half a dozen more fights on his hands within five minutes;
yet if he didn't he was a coward. For a moment he stood there
facing Gilly's blazing eyes, and then, with a sudden choking
sound, he forced his way through the ring and rushed from the
room.
The month following bracketed the thirty most miserable days of
his life. Every waking moment he was under the lashing tongues
of his contemporaries; his habits and mannerisms became butts
for intolerable witticisms and, of course, the sensitiveness of
adolescence was a further thorn. He considered that he was a
natural pariah; that the unpopularity at school would follow him
through life. When he went home for the Christmas holidays he
was so despondent that his father sent him to a nerve
specialist. When he returned to Andover he arranged to arrive
late so that he could be alone in the bus during the drive from
station to school.
Of course when he had learned to keep his mouth shut every one
promptly forgot all about him. The next autumn, with his
realization that consideration for others was the discreet
attitude, he made good use of the clean start given him by the
shortness of boyhood memory. By the beginning of his senior year
Samuel Meredith was one of the best-liked boys of his class--and
no one was any stronger for him than his first friend and
constant companion, Gilly Hood.