"Why so?" asked Bradley, looking carefully at the big, smooth-faced, rather gloomy-looking young fellow.
Shep hit his own head with his fist in a comically significant gesture.
"Brains! What d" ye call "em, Milt? Correscations of the serry beltum."
Shepard was a short youth with thick yellow hair, and a comically serious quality in the twist of his long upper lip.
Milton grinned. "Convolutions of the cerebrum, I s"pose you"re driving at. Shep comes to school to have fun," Milton explained to Bradley.
"Chuss," said Shep, by which he meant yes; "an" I have it, too, betyerneck. I enter no plea, me lord"--
There came a burst of applause as a tall and attractive girl came in with her arms laden down with books. Her intellectual face lit up with a smile at the applause, and a pink flush came into her pale cheek.
"That"s Miss Graham," whispered Shepard; "she"s all bent up on Radbourn."
The teachers came in, the choir rose to sing, and the exercises of the morning began. Bradley thought Miss Graham, with her heavy-lidded, velvety-brown eyes, looked like Miss Wilbur. Her eyes were darker, he decided, and she was taller and paler; in fact, the resemblance was mainly in her manner which had the same dignity and repose.
At Milton"s suggestion Bradley remained in his seat after the rest of the pupils had marched out to the sound of the organ. Then Milton introduced him to the princ.i.p.al, who took him by the hand so cordially that his embarra.s.sment was gone in a moment. "Come and see me at eleven," he said. After a short talk with him in his room a couple hours later, his work was a.s.signed.
"You"ll be in the preparatory department, Mr. Talcott, but if you care to do extra work we may get you into the junior cla.s.s. Jennings, look after him a little, won"t you?"
The princ.i.p.al was a kind man, but he had two hundred of these rude, awkward farmer-boys, and he could not be expected to study each one closely enough to discover their latent powers. Bradley went away down town to buy his books, with a feeling that the smile of the princ.i.p.al was not genuine, and he felt also that Milton was a little ashamed of him here in the town. Everything seemed to be going hard with him. But his hardest trial came when he entered the cla.s.sroom at one o"clock.
He knew no one, of course, and the long, narrow room was filled with riotous boys and girls all much younger than himself. All the desks seemed to be occupied and he was obliged to run the gauntlet of the entire cla.s.s in his search for a seat. As he walked down the room so close to the wall that he brushed the chalk of the blackboard off upon his shoulder, he made a really ludicrous figure. All of his fine, free, unconscious grace was gone and his strength of limb only added to his awkwardness.
The girls were of that age where they find the keenest delight in annoying a bashful fellow such as they perceived this new-comer to be.
His hair had been badly barbered by Councill and his suit of cotton diagonal, originally too small and never a fit, was now yellow on the shoulders where the sun had faded the a.n.a.line dye, and his trousers were so tight that they clung to the tops of his great boots, exposing his huge feet in all their enormity of shapeless housing. His large hands protruded from his sleeves and were made still more noticeable by his evident loss of their control.
"Picked too soon," said Nettie Russell, with a vacant stare into s.p.a.ce, whereat the rest shrieked with laughter. A great hot wave of blood rushed up over Bradley, making him dizzy. He knew that joke all too well. He looked around blindly for a seat. As he stood there helpless, Nettie hit him with a piece of chalk and someone threw the eraser at his boots.
"Number twelves," said young Brown.
"When did it get loose?"
"Does your mother know you"re out?"
"Put your hat over it," came from all sides.
He saw an empty chair and started to sit down, but Nettie slipped into it before him. He started for her seat and her brother Claude got there apparently by mere accident just before him. Bradley stood again indecisively, not daring to look up, burning with rage and shame. Again someone hit him with a piece of chalk, making a resounding whack, and the entire cla.s.s roared again in concert.
"Why, its head is _wood!_" said Claude, in apparent astonishment at his own discovery.
Bradley raised his head for the first time. There came into his eyes a look that made Claude Russell tremble. He again approached an empty chair and was again forestalled by young Brown. With a bitter curse he swung his great open palm around and laid his tormenter flat on the floor, stunned and breathless. A silence fell on the group. It was as if a lion had awakened with a roar of wrath.
"Come on, all o" ye!" he snarled through his set teeth, facing them all. As he stood thus the absurdity of his own att.i.tude came upon him.
They were only children, after all. Reeking with the sweat of shame and anger which burst from his burning skin, he reached for a chair.
Nettie, like the little dare-devil that she was, pulled the chair from under him, and he saved himself from falling only by wildly clutching the desk before him. As it was, he fell almost into her lap and everybody shrieked with uncontrollable laughter. In the midst of it, Miss Clayson, the teacher, came hurrying in to silence the tumult, and Bradley rushed from the room like a bull from the arena, maddened with the spears of the toreador. He s.n.a.t.c.hed his hat and coat from the rack and hardly looked up till he reached the haven of his little cellar.
He threw his cap on the floor and for a half hour raged up and down the floor, his mortification and shame and rage finding vent in a fit of cursing such as he had never had in his life before. All awkwardness was gone now. His great limbs, supple and swift, clenched, doubled, and thrust out against the air in unconscious lightning-swift gestures that showed how terrible he could be when roused.
At last he grew calm enough to sit down, and then his mood changed to the deepest dejection. He sank into a measureless despair. A terrible ache came into his throat.
They were right, he was a great hulking fool. He never could be anything but a clod-hopper, anyway. He looked down at his great hand, at his short trousers, and the indecent ugliness of his horrible boots, and studied himself without mercy to himself. He acknowledged that they were hideous, but he couldn"t help it.
Then his mind took another turn and he went over the history of that suit. He didn"t want it when he bought it, but he found himself like wax, moulded by the soft, white, confidential hands of the Jew salesman, who offered it to him as a special favor below cost. In common with other young men of his sort he always felt under obligation to buy if he went into a store, even if there were nothing there that suited him. He knew when he bought the suit and paid eleven dollars for it that he would always be sorry, and its cheapness now appalled him.
He always swore at himself for this weakness before the salesman, and yet, year by year he had been cheated in the same way. For the first time, however, he saw his clothing in all its hideousness. Those cruel girls and grinning boys had shown him that clothes made the man, even in a western school. The worst part of it was that he had been humiliated by a girl and there was no redress. His strength of limb was useless here.
He sat there till darkness came into his room. He did not replenish the coal in the stove that leered at him from the two broken doors in front, and seemed to face him with a crazy, drunken reel on its mis-matched legs. He was hungry, but he sat there enjoying in a morbid way the pang of hunger. It helped him someway to bear the sting of his defeat.
It was the darkest hour of his life. He swore never to go back again to that room. He couldn"t face that crowd of grinning faces. He turned hot and cold by turns as he thought of his folly. He was a cursed fool for ever thinking of trying to do anything but just dig away on a farm. He might have known how it would be; he"d got behind and had to be cla.s.sed in with the children; there was no help for it; he"d never go back.
The thought of _Her_ came in again and again, but the thought couldn"t help him. _Her_ face drove the last of his curses from his lips, but it threw him into a fathomless despair, where he no longer defined his thoughts into words. _Her_ face shone like a star, but it stood over a bottomless rift in the earth and showed how impa.s.sable its yawning barrier was.
There came a whoop outside and a scramble at the door and somebody tumbled into the room.
"Anybody here?"
"h.e.l.lo, where are you, Brad?"
He recognized Milton"s voice. "Yes, I"m here; but wait a minute."
"Caesar, I _guess_ we"ll wait! Break our necks if we don"t," said the other shadow whom he now recognized as Shep Watson. "Always live in the dark?"
They waited while he lighted the dim little kerosene lamp on the table.
"O conspiracy, shamest thou to show thy dangerous brow by night,"
quoted Shep in the interim.
"Been "sleep?" asked Milton.
"No. Se" down, anywheres," he added on second thought, as he realized that chairs were limited.
"Say, Brad, come on; let"s go over t" the society."
"I guess not," said Brad sullenly.
"Why not?" asked Milton, recognizing something bitter in his voice.
"Because, I aint got any right to go. I aint goin" t" school ag"in. I"m goin" west."
"Why, what"s up?"
"I aint a-goin", that"s all. I can"t never ketch up with the rest of you fellers." His voice broke a little, "an" it aint much fun havin" to go in with a whole raft o" little boys and girls."
"Oh, say now, Brad, I wouldn"t mind "em if I was you," said Milton, after a pause. He had the delicacy not to say he had heard the details of Bradley"s experience. "We all have to go through "bout the same row o" stumps, don"t we, Shep? The way to do with "em is to jest pay no "tention to "em."
But the good-will and sympathy of the boys could not prevail upon Bradley to go with them. He persisted in his determination to leave school. And the boys finally went out leaving him alone. Their influence had been good, however; he was distinctly less bitter after they left him and his thoughts went back to Miss Wilbur. What would she think of him if he gave up all his plans the first day, simply because some mischievous girls and boys had made him absurd? When he thought of her he felt strong enough to go back, but when he thought of his tormentors and what he would be obliged to endure from them, he shivered and shrank back into despondency.
He was still fighting his battle, when a slow step came down the stairs ending in a sharp rap upon the door. He said, "Come in," and Radbourn, the most powerful and most popular senior, entered the room. He was a good deal of an autocrat in the town and in the school, and took pleasure in exercising his power on behalf of some poor devil like Bradley Talcott.