A BOY WHO WASN’T AN ASS BUT BEHAVED LIKE ONE
Baccalaureate services being over
and the graduates duly exhorted to the wisdom of the
ages, the latter were for a time permitted to alight
from their lofty pedestal in the public eye and to
revert temporarily to the comfortable if less exalted
state of being plain every day human girls.
While Philip and Carlotta went up
on the heights fondly believing they were settling
their destinies forever, Tony had been enjoying an
afternoon en famille with her uncle and her
brother Ted.
Suddenly she looked at her watch and
sprang up from the arm of her uncle’s chair
on which she had been perched, chattering and content,
for a couple of hours.
“My goodness! It is most
four o’clock. Dick will be here in a minute.
May I call up the garage and ask them to send the
car around? I’m dying for a ride.
We can go over to South Hadley and get the twins, if
you’d like. I’m sure they must have
had enough of Mt. Holyoke by this time.”
“Car’s out of commission,”
grunted Ted from behind his sporting sheet.
“Out of commission? Since
when?” inquired Doctor Holiday. “It
was all right when you took it to the garage last
night.”
“I went out for a joy ride and
had a smash up,” explained his nephew nonchalantly,
and still hidden behind the newspaper.
“Oh Ted! How could you
when you know we want to use the car every minute?”
There was sharp dismay and reproach in Tony’s
voice.
“Well, I didn’t smash
it on purpose, did I?” grumbled her brother,
throwing down the paper. “I’m sorry,
Tony. But it can’t be helped now.
You’d better be thankful I’m not out of
commission myself. Came darn near being.”
“Oh Ted!” There was only
concern and sympathy in his sister’s exclamation
this time. Tony adored her brothers. She
went over to Ted now, scrutinizing him as if she half
expected to see him minus an arm or a leg. “You
weren’t hurt?” she begged reassurance.
“Nope nothing to
signify. Got some purple patches on my person
and a twist to my wrist, but that’s all.
I was always a lucky devil. Got more lives than
a cat.”
He was obviously trying to carry matters
off lightly, but never once did he meet his uncle’s
eyes, though he was quite aware they were fixed on
him.
Tony sighed and shook her head, troubled.
“I wish you wouldn’t take
such risks,” she mourned. “Some day
you’ll get dreadfully hurt. Please be careful.
Uncle Phil,” she appealed to the higher court,
“do tell him he mustn’t speed so.
He won’t listen to me.”
“If Ted hasn’t learned
the folly of speeding by now, I am afraid that nothing
I can say will have much effect. I wonder ”
Just here the telephone interrupted
with an announcement that Mr. Carson was waiting downstairs.
Tony flew from the phone to dab powder on her nose.
“Since we can’t go riding
I think I’ll take Dick for a walk in Paradise,”
she announced into the mirror. “Will you
come, too, Uncle Phil?”
“No, thank you, dear. Run
along and tell Dick we expect him back to supper with
us.”
The doctor held open the door for
his niece, then turned back to Ted, who was also on
his feet now, murmuring something about going out
for a stroll.
“Wait a bit, son. Suppose
you tell me first precisely what happened last night.”
“Did tell you.” The
boy fumbled sulkily at the leaves of a magazine that
lay on the table. “I took the car out and,
when I was speeding like Sam Hill out on the Florence
road, I struck a hole. She stood up on her ear
and pitched u er me out
in the gutter. Stuck her own nose into a telephone
pole. I telephoned the garage people to go after
her this morning. They told me a while ago she
was pretty badly stove up and it will probably take
a couple of weeks to get her in order.”
The story came out jerkily and the narrator kept his
eyes consistently floorward during the recital.
“Is that all?”
“What more do you want?”
curtly. “I said I was sorry, if that is
what you mean.”
“It isn’t what I mean,
Ted. I assume you didn’t deliberately go
out to break my car and that you are not particularly
proud of the outcome of your joy ride. I mean,
exactly what I asked. Have you told me the whole
story?”
Ted was silent, mechanically rolling
the corner of the, rug under his foot. His uncle
studied the good-looking, unhappy young face.
His mind worked back to that inadvertent “u er me”
of the confession.
“Were you alone?” he asked.
A scarlet flush swept the lad’s
face, died away, leaving it a little white.
“Yes.”
The answer was low but distinct.
It was like a knife thrust to the doctor. In
all the eight years in which he had fathered Ned’s
sons, both before and since his brother’s death,
never once to his knowledge had either one lied to
him, even to save himself discomfort, censure or punishment.
With all their boyish vagaries and misdeeds, it had
been the one thing he could count on absolutely, their
unflinching, invariable honesty. Yet, surely
as the June sun was shining outside, Ted had lied to
him just now. Why? Rash twenty was too young
to go its way unchallenged and unguided. He was
responsible for the lad whose dead father had committed
him to his charge.
Only a few weeks before his death
Ned had written with curious prescience, “If
I go out any time, Phil, I know you will look after
the children as I would myself or better. Keep
your eye on Ted especially. His heart is in the
right place, but he has a reckless devil in him that
will bring him and all of us to grief if it isn’t
laid.”
Doctor Holiday went over and laid
a hand on each of the lad’s hunched shoulders.
“Look at me, Ted,” he commanded gently.
The old habit of obedience strong
in spite of his twenty years, Ted raised his eyes,
but dropped them again on the instant as if they were
lead weighted.
“That is the first time you
ever lied to me, I think, lad,” said the doctor
quietly.
A quiver passed over the boy’s
face, but his lips set tighter than ever and he pulled
away from his uncle’s hands and turned, staring
out of the window at a rather dusty and bedraggled
looking hydrangea on the lawn.
“I wonder if it was necessary,”
the quiet voice continued. “I haven’t
the slightest wish to be hard on you. I just
want to understand. You know that, son, don’t
you?”
The boy’s head went up at that.
His gaze deserted the hydrangea, for the first time
that day, met his uncle’s, squarely if somewhat
miserably.
“It isn’t that, Uncle
Phil. You have every right to come down on me.
I hadn’t any business to have the car out at
all, much less take fool chances with it. But
honestly I have told you all all I can tell.
I did lie to you just now. I wasn’t alone.
There was a a girl with me.”
Ted’s face was hot again as he made the confession.
“I see,” mused the doctor. “Was
she hurt?”
“No that is not
much. She hurt her shoulder some and cut her head
a bit.” The details came out reluctantly
as if impelled by the doctor’s steady eyes.
“She telephoned me today she was all right.
It’s a miracle we weren’t both killed
though. We might have been as easy as anything.
You said just now nothing you could say would make
me have sense about speeding. I guess what happened
last night ought to knock sense into me if anything
could. I say, Uncle Phil ”
“Well?” as the boy paused obviously embarrassed.
“If you don’t mind I’d
rather not say anything more about the girl.
She I guess she’d rather I wouldn’t,”
he wound up confusedly.
“Very well. That is your
affair and hers. Thank you for coming halfway
to meet me. It made it easier all around.”
The doctor held out his hand and the boy took it eagerly.
“You are great to me, Uncle
Phil lots better than I deserve. Please
don’t think I don’t see that. And
truly I am awfully ashamed of smashing the car, and
not telling you, as I ought to have this morning, and
spoiling Tony’s fun and and everything.”
Ted swallowed something down hard as if the “everything”
included a good deal. “I don’t see
why I have to be always getting into scrapes.
Can’t seem to help it, somehow. Guess I
was made that way, just as Larry was born steady.”
“That is a spineless jellyfish
point of view, Ted. Don’t fool yourself
with it. There is no earthly reason why you should
keep drifting from one escapade to another. Get
some backbone into you, son.”
Ted’s face clouded again at
that, though he wasn’t sulky this time.
He was remembering some other disagreeable confessions
he had to make before long. He knew this was
a good opening for them, but somehow he could not
drive himself to follow it up. He could only digest
a limited amount of humble pie at a time and had already
swallowed nearly all he could stand. Still he
skirted warily along the edge of the dilemma.
“I suppose you think I made
an awful ass of myself at college this year,”
he averred gloomily.
“I don’t think it.
I know it.” The doctor’s eyes twinkled
a little. Then he grew sober. “Why
do you, Ted? You aren’t really an ass, you
know. If you were, there might be some excuse
for behaving like one.”
Ted flushed.
“That’s what Larry told
me last spring when he was pitching into me about well
about something. I don’t know why I do,
Uncle Phil, honest I don’t. Maybe it is
because I hate college so and all the stale old stuff
they try to cram down our throats. I get so mad
and sick and disgusted with the whole thing that I
feel as if I had to do something to offset it something
that is real and live, even if it isn’t according
to rules and regulations. I hate rules and regulations.
I’m not a mummy and I don’t want to be
made to act as if I were. I’ll be a long
time dead and I want to get a whole lot of fun out
of life first. I hate studying. I want to
do things, Uncle Phil ”
“Well?”
“I don’t want to go back to college.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Join the Canadian forces.
It makes me sick to have a war going on and me not
in it. Dad quit college for West Point and everybody
thought it was all right. I don’t see why
I shouldn’t get into it. I wouldn’t
fall down on that. I promise you. I’d
make you proud of me instead of ashamed the way you
are now.” The boy’s voice and eyes
were unusually earnest.
His uncle did not answer instantly.
He knew that there was some truth in his nephew’s
analysis of the situation. It was his uneasy,
superabundant energy and craving for action that made
him find the more or less restricted life of the college,
a burden, a bore and an exasperation, and drove him
to crazy escapades and deeds of flagrant lawlessness.
He needed no assurance that the boy would not “fall
down” at soldiering. He would take to it
as a duck to water. And the discipline might be
the making of him, prove the way to exorcise the devil.
Still there were other considerations which to him
seemed paramount for the time at least.
“I understand how you feel,
Ted,” he said at last. “If we get
into the war ourselves I won’t say a word against
your going. I should expect you to go. We
all would. But in the meantime as I see it you
are not quite a free agent. Granny is old and
very, very feeble. She hasn’t gotten over
your father’s death. She grieves over it
still. If you went to war I think it would kill
her. She couldn’t bear the strain and anxiety.
Patience, laddie. You don’t want to hurt
her, do you?”
“I s’pose not,”
said Ted a little grudgingly. “Then it is
no, Uncle Phil?”
“I think it ought to be no of
your own will for Granny’s sake. We don’t
live to ourselves alone in this world. We can’t.
But aside from Granny I am not at all certain I should
approve of your leaving college just because it doesn’t
happen to be exciting enough to meet your fancy and
means work you are too lazy and irresponsible to settle
down to doing. Looks a little like quitting to
me and Holidays aren’t usually quitters, you
know.”
He smiled at the boy but Ted did not
smile back. The thrust about Holidays and quitters
went home.
“I suppose it has got to be
college again if you say so,” he said soberly
after a minute. “Thank heaven there are
three months ahead clear though first.”
“To play in?”
“Well, yes. Why not?
It is all right to play in vacation, isn’t it?”
the boy retorted, a shade aggressively.
“Possibly if you have earned
the vacation by working beforehand.”
Ted’s eyes fell at that.
This was dangerously near the ground of those uncomfortable,
inevitable confessions which he meant to put off as
long as possible.
“Do you mind if I go out now?”
he asked with unusual meekness after a moment’s
rather awkward silence.
“No, indeed. Go ahead.
I’ve had my say. Be back for supper with
us?”
“Dunno.” And Ted
disappeared into the adjoining room which connected
with his uncle’s. In a moment he was back,
expensive panama hat in one hand and a lighted cigarette
held jauntily in the other. “I meant to
tell you you could take the car repairs out of my
allowance,” he remarked casually but with his
eye shrewdly on his guardian as he made the announcement.
“Very well,” replied the
latter quietly. Then he smiled a little seeing
his nephew’s crestfallen expression. “That
wasn’t just what you wanted me to say, was it?”
he added.
“Not exactly,” admitted
the boy with a returning grin. “All right,
Uncle Phil. I’m game. I’ll pay
up.”
A moment later his uncle heard his
whistle as he went down the driveway apparently as
care free as if narrow escapes from death were nothing
in his young life. The doctor shook his head
dubiously as he watched him from the window.
He would have felt more dubious still had he seen the
boy board a Florence car a few minutes later on his
way to keep a rendezvous with the girl about whom
he had not wished to talk.