That furtive, rustling noise in Mr. Buckman’s dimly lighted hall haunted
Max for days, filling him with a vague uneasiness he called foolish, but
could not forget. Yet after a time youth and returning health relegated
the memory to some niche in the mind’s storehouse; and life became full
of interest and wholesome occupation, driving out apprehension.
A little more than a week after his engagement at the “show house” had
terminated, and he had made the senior class at the “Fifth Avenue High,”
Billy Bennett’s ringing voice came over the wire.
“Is Mumps there?” it asked, and Sydney heard it across the room.
“Tell your friend a better name to call you; that is a sick one. I smell
the drug store now!” Mrs. Schmitz laughed as she put down the receiver
and started out.
“Billy To-morrow can call me any old name; he’s all right!” Sydney
shouted after her; and into the telephone he cried, “Hello, Billy
To-morrow! What’s up today?”
“The Queen says you’ve turned her down. She’s all fussed up because you
refuse to come to her party. She can’t think what she’s done to disquiet
you.”
The Queen, otherwise Bess Carter! The one girl of all girls for Sydney.
Yet he could never hold up his head when she spoke to him; and if he saw
her coming he always edged away.
“She’s done nothing but all right, Billy. She’s always to the good; but
I--I--oh, hang it! You know, Billy, I’m no girl’s guy.”
“Rats! You don’t have to be a girl’s guy to go to her party. Haven’t we
all played together as kids? Roughed it together at camp, and worked
together at the school rallies? It’s just a chin-fest along the same old
lines with a little music and dancing thrown in; a lot rather. And she
wants the quartette.”
“Gee!” Sydney said no more, but his inflection carried assent.
“All right. I thought you’d see it that way.”
“I haven’t said I’d go,” Sydney broke in.
“Oh, yes, you have. You’re not the laddie to spoil the Queen’s evening by
breaking up the quartette, the feature she’s most counting on, she says.”
“If I go will you help me to ask a question of Bess?”
“Sure, what is it?”
“I’ll tell you when I see you.”
Billy did not misjudge his friend, though he could have no conception of
the agony of bashfulness Sydney endured at merely the thought of meeting
a lot of girls in their evening frocks.
“You know I’ve no glad rags for evening, Billy.”
“No matter. You have good enough. None of us are going in for opera hats
and patent leathers; that is, only the Fussers. Will you come to dinner
with me tonight and stay for rehearsal?”
“All right. Thank you. Say, Billy! Hello, Billy!”
“Hi, there! Thought you had finished,” Billy returned after a slight
wait. “Hello!” he called again as Sydney did not answer.
In that hesitant moment Sydney decided to abandon his intention of
asking an invitation for Max. With his airy, sophisticated manner, his
good looks, his playing, Max would be sure to win the heart of every one
present. And then his cough--really he was not well enough.
Thus jealousy argued; but in that flashing instant between Billy’s first
and second “Hello,” Sydney caught himself up; called himself a selfish,
“pin-minded brute!”
“Jealous! That’s what I am. Because I’m short and thick instead of
slender and elegant as Max is; have mud-colored hair and no-colored eyes
instead of a face clear and dark, with eyes that can talk without help
from lips or tongue, as his can, I’ll cut him out of a good time! Mumps,
you’re a last season’s egg!”
“What’s that you’re rumbling. Is your tongue weak today?”
“Nothing, Billy. I was giving myself a dose of mental ipecac, had
something N. G. in my system, but it’s out now.”
“Well, in your state of good health what’s next?”
“We’ve got a--I mean I’ve got a friend here, you met him, Max Ball. He’s
a violinist, a regular high C, Mrs. Schmitz says, a good looker and
actor. May I bring him along?”
There was a word in reply, a short wait, and Billy’s voice came again.
“It’s all right. Marms says bring him along, and sister says tell him to
bring his violin.”
Max received his invitation in silence; a silence that piqued Sydney. “If
you don’t care to meet my friends, say so. I’ll tell Billy to count your
plate off,” he said roughly.
“Don’t take it that way. I appreciate the courtesy, believe me.
Yet--ought I to accept? Suppose they knew--all about me, would they ask
me just the same? Is it fair to them for you to take me?”
“Gee! I never thought about that,” Sydney mused, glancing at Max with new
respect.
“Does Mrs. Schmitz know your friends?”
“Yes. She thinks they’re fine folks.”
“Then we’ll ask her.”
Questioned, she too, thought a moment before replying, her eyes fixed on
the doubting one. “Max,” she began seriously, “I have belief in you. I
feel sure you will make goot. Sydney shall tell his friends that you are
one dear friend of me. I stand for you.”
Max gazed steadily back at her a second, then laid his hand on hers.
“Thank you. I shall not shame you.” The words were simple but Sydney felt
the earnestness in them; saw the moisture in the dark eyes, and turned
aside to hide his own. He, too, was won, and promised himself to believe
in Max always.
This was Max’s introduction to the delightful home where Billy Bennett
and his mother lived with his married sister Edith and her husband, Mr.
Wright.
Through the dinner, which was perfectly served, Sydney watched Max with
an envy he despised but could not conquer. Every word and move of the
stranger lad proved that he had found his own. The way he spoke to the
ladies, the confident, unconscious but correct use of the silver, a
matter that made Sydney turn red with anxiety; Max’s low and different
yet kind tone to the maid; his easy yet modest attitude toward Mr.
Wright--everything was just right, Sydney acknowledged to himself.
How did he come by it? Sydney felt he could not in a thousand years
acquire such a manner; and at the same time it seemed just then the one
thing on earth worth having. Poor Sydney did not know that many boys,
even some reared in comfortable homes, are harassed in their years of
development by a similar diffidence. He thought it was caused entirely by
his lack of training.
He could see that Max won them all, especially Mr. Wright, with whom he
talked intelligently on current topics; and Mrs. Wright when they touched
upon music, as well as Billy’s mother when she asked of Max’s own, and
he replied that she was dead. Sydney could remember his own mother only
dimly. He had not such a passionate love for her as he detected in Max’s
low reply that was in no different tone from his other words; yet its
indefinable intensity told volumes about his heart feeling.
After dinner Billy’s sister carried Max off to the piano and they had
what Billy called an orgy of music, neither paying much attention to the
rest in the room.
Mr. Wright went to his den, and Mrs. Bennett disappeared, leaving Sydney
alone with Billy. They settled among the cushions on a window seat where
twinkling lights on the Sound below, as well as sharp little whistles,
revealed the coming and going of many small steamers, part of the
Mosquito Fleet that connects a thousand miles of Sound shore with the
metropolis, the City of Green Hills.
The moon sent a silver track across the dark water, and the distant,
fir-fringed shores outlined dimly against the starlit west seemed the
shadowy ramparts of fairyland.
Probably Billy appreciated the scene more deeply than Sydney, yet he saw
it often, and consequently was the first to speak.
“What’s the trick you want me to turn for you with Bess?”
At the telephone asking this favor from Billy had seemed a little thing;
now that the moment had come it was all but impossible. Yet he had
delayed too long. It was nearly a month since the night of Max’s coming,
the night when Sydney had determined to “do something for Ida”; but he
had let the days pass in inaction. This moment he was in for it.
“It’s about Ida Jones. Do you know her?”
“Just to bow; she isn’t in any of my classes.”
“She was in mine last year; when I moved up a grade at the beginning of
this semester I left her back there in the juniors.”
“What about her? Evidently you have her beaten in the highbrow race.”
“It wouldn’t have been so if I had been obliged to work all summer as she
did. You know the good old Pop fixed it for me. That’s how I was able to
study in vacation and make a class ahead.”
“Yes. But return to Miss Jones. And to Bess; what’s the relation?”
“I wish you’d ask the Queen to invite Ida to her party. It would put her
easy with her class if a senior, and such a senior as Miss Bess Carter,
asked her to a party.”
Billy laughed. “Is that all? Ask her yourself. You carry good weight with
her.”
“Billy! Billy To-morrow! I’ll never turn the trick in the world! You know
I’m tongue-tied when a girl shows up.”
“Surely not so in the case of Miss Jones,” Billy chaffed. “How did you
learn her troubles? You must have chinned some with her.”
“She never told me her troubles. I haven’t spoken ten minutes with her
altogether. But I can see--and hear.”
“What?”
“That all the girls nod coldly when she passes; that none of them run up
and make love to her, or--”
“Make love? Girls? What do you mean?”
“Don’t you see it all the time? Almost every girl in school is either on
her knees in adoration of some other one, or is herself the adored one.”
“Mumps! You’re getting classy! Both in language and in the matter
of observation.” Billy clapped his friend on the shoulder in true,
young-mannish fashion, a caress that would have floored one less sturdy.
“What do you hear?”
“Oh, scraps of conversation spoken between chums, yet to the world in
general. You know how it is with a certain kind of rich girl, she talks
loud, as if she owned the earth and wanted all to know it.”
“Not all the rich ones though. May Nell Smith is the richest girl in
school, but you can’t call her loud.”
“Surely not. And there are others of course. Perhaps I should have said
the girl who wishes to be thought rich, or those who haven’t been so very
long.”
“That’s it. You can spot ’em. Father worth half a million, half a pound
of extra hair. Father worth--by report--twenty thousand, two pounds of
the most startling hair.”
Sydney took up the comparison. “Father worth many millions and mother
a lady, just her own hair worn--worn--Well, that’s where I fall down.
Billy, how does Miss Smith wear her hair?”
Billy laughed. “And how does Miss Jones?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It looks awfully easy. It’s not bandaged like a broken
head, and it’s nicer than all those buns and cart wheels and things. It’s
curly.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because often she wears no hat, and the more it rains the curlier it
gets. That’s the way with Max’s.”
Billy sent a glance to the other visitor. “There’s surely some class to
him.” He stared at Max a moment but came abruptly back to the question.
“Who is Miss Jones’ father?”
“She has neither father nor mother. She just takes care of herself; works
right along for her board.”
Billy whistled. “That’s the little joker that turns up the other girls’
noses.”
“But why? I work for my board. Everybody knows I was a stowaway on the
San Francisco steamship, or can know it; I never tried to hide it. Did
it make any difference with you fellows? With you or Reg Steele and your
cousin Hec Price, who belong to the best people in the city, and the
richest? No. You took me in the same as you took in Redtop and Sis Jones;
and there’s more class to any of the fellows in your set than to me.
Don’t I know that?”
“That’s where you’re off the boulevard, old chap. You’re in the class
that has pluck and honesty and the capacity for friendship. That’s a
class by itself. You notice Walter Buckman doesn’t figure large in high
jinks engineered by Bess Carter or May Nell.”
“But why don’t the girls take in a friendless girl as you fellows took
me?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Girls are different.” Billy could not answer that
question. It was too large for him. It is too large for most people. We
see a sweet young thing making herself ridiculous over the sufferings of
a pampered cat, who yet will calmly stab to the heart with a cold stare
some struggling girl who wears a last year’s frock and earns the bread
she eats.
“I give it up,” Billy said after awhile. “But I’ll tell you one thing;
if Miss Jones is O. K. otherwise, working for her board won’t make any
difference to Bess Carter, nor to May Nell.”
“I know that. It’s why I am so anxious for Bess to invite her. Will you
do it--get Bess to ask her?”
“Yes. That is, I’ll tell Bess about her, and May Nell too.”
“Thank you.”
“Gee! What a lever money is.”
“Yes, for good or bad.”
“There’s May Nell Smith. As soon as she grew strong enough to stand the
strain of public school her father put her there because he wanted her to
come in touch with all sorts of children; and see what she can do. She’s
just as sweet as ever, and her nod is law to the girls.”
“You’d never know she was a rich man’s daughter by the way she dresses,
Ida says.”
“You’d know she was the daughter of a sensible woman though.”
Sydney agreed, his heart quite at rest about Ida; and both sat quietly
listening to the music. Neither realized the secrets of the great social
fabric they had grazed, though Sydney continued in thought to follow
the puzzle that provoked his question to Billy; why do girls--young
women--treat each other as they do?
This led back to the day many months earlier when a couple of squabbling
boys, turning the high school corner, ran against a girl, almost
knocking her over, and sending her books flying on the wet walk. They
were too occupied to notice their rudeness; but Sydney was in time to
prevent her from falling and to restore her books.
This was Ida Jones. Bashful as Sydney was, her gratitude unlocked his
speech; and walking home with her he learned a little of her loneliness
and struggle for an education. She probably told Sydney more of her life
than she would have told another, because his own life was so similar.
And ever since there had been this bond of sympathy between them, though
they rarely were together.
Mrs. Wright’s enthusiastic voice recalled Sydney from his reveries. “Mr.
Ball plays! Makes real music! Sydney, you should be glad to live in the
same house with him.”
Sydney wondered if he was grateful. Again the mean little yellow fiend of
envy stuck up its head, and he had his fight all over.
“I have persuaded him to play with the quartette; it will be a splendid
addition,” Mrs. Wright continued.
Billy rose and shook hands with him, boy fashion, for Billy was still a
boy at heart in all he did, yet a very lovable boy. “That’s all to the
good. Welcome to the jolly six--jolly seven it will be, now you have
joined.”
“You must bring Mrs. Schmitz over to some of the rehearsals. I shall call
on her very soon. Do you think she’d have time for me, Sydney?”
He was sure of it.
“And we shall drop the Mister and call you just plain Max, may we?” Billy
questioned. “No one is allowed a handle to his name but her, my sister
here. We have to permit that because she’s married.” Billy nudged his
sister, mischief in his eyes.
Max bowed gravely. “I shall be honored by your kindness.”
Billy, a trifle awed by Max’s seriousness, could not know that the
newcomer was feeling the weight of his responsibility; was wondering if
they would accept him so cordially if they knew all.
The other boys came, Charles Harper called Redtop because of his
“smiling” hair, a fine fellow, well grown and with eyes that looked
straight at his listener; and “Sis” Jones, Cicero really, but “Sis” in
his set since the day he had been caught embroidering a pattern on the
sail of the “Miss Snow,” Hector Price’s sailboat. Young Jones was as old
as any of them and as plucky; but he was slender, blond, not very tall,
and gave the impression of effeminacy. Yet certain ones who knew said
those small hands could grip like iron.
His voice was the sweet, haunting tenor, while Sydney was second tenor.
Charles sang a deep, rich bass, and Billy second bass. All-round utility
man Billy called himself, since his voice was adaptable, and if his
sister was prevented it was Billy who accompanied on the piano. He was
also librarian, sent out meeting notices, and otherwise, “bossed the
job,” to use his own words.
The other member was Hugh Price, “Squab,” Billy’s short fat cousin.
He had grown since the happy camping days at Lallula, but it seemed
all laterally. His anxiety to gain height was well known, and the most
acceptable compliment one could pay him was to say, “You’re taller.” He
played the flute--played it well.
All welcomed Max cordially, and still more enthusiastically when they had
heard him play. And rapidly the two hours of practice passed; as a breath
to Sydney, who not only loved to sing, but lived his happiest hours, in
this household.
On the way home when the two boys, Max and Sydney, changed cars at a busy
junction, they found the second car crowded at the rear end with high
school students. They had evidently been somewhere in a body, and were
noisy and restless, obstructing the passage way, playing rough pranks,
and acting as if they owned the car.
“Move up forward!” the conductor repeated with no effect.
The two edged slowly through, hindered by the wedged mass, and slyly
tripped by a hidden foot. All knew Sydney and greeted him by his
nickname; but only one spoke to Max.
“Hello, young feller! What are you out of quod for?” sneered that one in
his ear.
Max knew him. It was Walter Buckman, who had opened the door to him the
night he went to pay for his stolen supper. As Max, trying to obey the
conductor, pressed forward, one, instigated by Walter, pushed Sydney
aside and jerked Max against a lady so adroitly that it seemed entirely
Max’s fault.
He righted himself, apologizing earnestly. But he had torn her dress and
she was not very gracious.
“Aw, you have to excuse a drunken man, lady,” a noisy one called out,
and again began the pushing and scuffling.
“Move up front there or I’ll put you off!” the conductor ordered more
sternly.
“I’d like to see you do it!” one of the bolder threatened.
Sydney saw Walter secretly urge the big fellow on.
The conductor was not afraid. He stopped the car right there, opened the
gates, and collared the aggressor.
But the students stood by their mate, and it would have gone hard with
the conductor if one or two men had not risen quickly and faced them.
“You get off the car or we’ll help him put you off!” said one, a well
known banker, a man of power in the city.
The big fellow, seeing opposition was useless, stepped down, calling to
the others to follow; but the conductor shut the gates, rang two bells,
and again ordered the young men forward.
“Buckman, you get forward there,” the same authoritative passenger
ordered. “You’re the ringleader.” And to the lady of the torn dress he
said, indicating Max, “This young man is not at fault; it was those
behind him. I saw them.”
“Stop at the next corner,” ordered Walter.
The conductor was about to ring when the same man of authority said,
“Conductor, go on.” And to the boys, “You young ruffians, get up forward
there as ordered!”
“You can’t do that,” Walter began; “we’ll have an action against the
company. You can’t prevent a passenger getting off at any street he
wants.”
“Very well. Bring your action. I’m president of the company, and I
think, Walter Buckman, that your father will not care to sue for you,
not with these witnesses.” He whipped out a notebook and took the names
and addresses of some of the passengers, the lady’s whose dress had been
torn, and of one or two well-known men.
Sullenly the squad of trouble makers moved up the aisle. And as they
passed Max, Walter leaned over and whispered in his ear, “I’ll get even
with you for this.”
Sydney heard the words. “Don’t get fussed up,” he said to Max. “There’s
a few coming to him. That bunch isn’t out for any good, and Walt Buckman
ought to be headed the other way this time of night. He lives the second
door from Billy.”
Max made no reply. Through the rest of the ride and while the two walked
the block between the car line and the nursery, he was wondering what
form Walter’s threat would take. And while he prepared for bed, and still
more in troubled dreams, his imagination conjured gruesome pictures.