Don-A-Dreams/Part 1/Chapter 4
IV
Between the ages of eight years and of eighteen, there seems to be a period in which the individuality of the schoolboy does not develop. The originality of the child has been overgrown; the eccentricities of the young man have not yet sprouted. Don, seated at a desk that was exactly like a score of other desks in Miss Morris's schoolroom, studied the common lessons from the prescribed books; and what he learned, he learned like a parrot. Seated at home, beside the "study" table in the playroom, he worked out his exercises mechanically with Frankie, or idly scorched the wood of his lead pencils over the flame of the lamp. He learned to play the games which his schoolmates played, to fight as they fought, to believe what they believed, to act as they acted. His mind no longer grew of its own strength, in its own inclination; it was forced in a hothouse bed, and trained to a set figure.
He was perhaps a trifle more timorous and retiring than most of his classmates, slower to fight, slower to learn, and more given to what Miss Morris called "dazing" over his books; but in all the broad characteristics of his age, he was commonplace and typical. Even in the playground he did nothing to mark himself out among his fellows—except to the eyes of little Mary Morris, whose admiration was so silent that he remained unaware of it. Once he attempted to take an impossibly high jump, went at it in a smiling assurance, and fell over it with amazement. (He explained, then, bruised and tearful, that he had dreamed, the previous night, of jumping the six-foot fence at the back of the yard, and had leaped over it with ease and grace.) Ordinarily, he lacked the desire to shine. He lacked it notably in comparison with Frankie; but then Frankie was growing to be the sort of boy who will not let you pass him on the street—even though he has to run to keep ahead of you—and who sleeps always on his side, with a leg drawn up, in an attitude of climbing caught from the schoolbook illustration of Longfellow's "Excelsior."
At the age of nine, Don was a weedy boy, slope-shouldered, loose-wristed, pale and very shy. He was not strong enough in the arm to enjoy baseball; and he was too weak in the calves to relish "Pump, pump, pull away" or "Hounds and Deer"; and for that reason, he did not join in half the games of the yard and the pavement. He spent his idle hours reading stories of Indians, English boarding-school boys and midshipmen; and on Sundays he gave himself with a precocious devoutness to church and Sabbath school. He had been impressed with the teaching that the Deity is omnipresent; and in his solitary moments he was almost physically conscious of the awful presence of the Spirit. It was a feeling which he kept as secret as a sin; but it came to possess him with a sense of companionship. He even played with it imaginatively, half expecting visions and praying in a childish ecstasy; and in the public Park near his home, there was a thick clump of bushes in which he used to build little fires of chips and leaves to burn wooden animals from his ark as Hebraic offerings.
Among the pupils of Miss Morris's school was Don's elder cousin Conroy—the boy whose face Miss Margaret had not liked; and between Don and him there had always been a boyish ill-will that grew into a noticeable enmity as Don became more of a long-legged weakling and Conroy more of a pug-nosed and sturdy bully. The tie of their relationship, added to Don's plain inferiority in physical strength, kept them from any set fights, but Conroy played rough tricks on his cousin, tripped him slyly in the class-room, shouldered him from the sidewalk into the gutter, filled his cap with snow, and laughingly pelted and persecuted him in the playground and on the street. At the same time, he would not let anyone else take the same liberties; and he fought more than one of the boys who—in the expressive idiom of the schoolyard—"picked on" Don. Conroy plodded through his studies as slowly as Don sauntered; and they moved along together at the foot of their classes in an enforced companionship that was contemptuously kindly on Conroy's side and at once grateful and resentful on Don's.
Then one day the cousin came to school with the whole story of Don's flirtation with Miss Margaret—a story he had learned from the dinner-table talk of his elders on the previous evening. It was now three years since she had passed out of their lives, but Conroy still remembered her aversion to his "face" and her whole-hearted admiration of Don; and to the older point of view which he had newly caught, Don's whole affair had been a ridiculous childishness that had ended in the still mor ridiculous fiasco of the torn photograph and Miss Margaret's indifferent departure.
It was shameful to Don when it was brought up to him again, and he blushed and suffered bashfully under his cousin's public teasing. "Did she use to kiss you in the summer-house?" the others twitted him. "Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie," they called him. "Go and play with the girls and give them your photograph."
He silenced some of the younger ones by boxing their ears; he was even irritated into fighting a boy of his own height, and was only saved from a beating by Conroy's interference. But the cousin kept up his own teasing, day after day; and when Saturday came Don went out alone to his haunts in the Park, almost a persecuted refugee from the small society of the neighbourhood.
It was a clear June morning, with a breeze that rustled in the driveway maples and a sunlight that lay dazzlingly white on the gravel walks; and Don looked about him with an easing sense of freedom, drawing a refreshingly deep breath. He had not yet learned to be sentimental about nature; he had merely an animal pleasure in the escape to the open, where his eyes could stretch their book-cramped muscles in long sight, and he could walk free from the critical observation of his elders and talk shamelessly to himself.
He was heading for the wilder upper portion of the Park—where there were no flower-beds, and the ground had not been levelled, and the grass was uncut—when he saw the distant figure of a boy coming after him across the lower lawns; and he immediately dodged behind a bed of lilac bushes bordered with geraniums and striped ribbon grass. It was a large bed, in the shape of a great crescent; and Don skirted it, under cover—crouching in the accepted manner of an Indian scout—and peeped around the far tip of the crescent to see his cousin Conroy coming up on his trail. He knew it was against the law to enter one of these hoed beds of bushes; but, seeing no other escape, he ran back and leaped over the geraniums and crawled in among the lilacs on his hands and knees.
He lay down in a little open patch of ground in the centre of the bed and listened breathlessly for the footsteps of his pursuer. After a long time, he heard Conroy calling him at a distance up the Park, He rose cautiously to his knees, took off his little Scotch cap, and began to repeat his usual prayers in peace. And then, to make his devotions more real, he gathered some broken branches and small twigs, drove the straighter ones into the soft earth and put the others across them in a crude representation of an altar.
The story of that make-believe cannot be followed farther without an appearance of sacrilege; but Don's memory was full of Old Testament stories of Jehovah's interference in aid of his prophets; he had not yet learned that the age of miracles had ceased; and when he came out of the bushes again, he walked like a young David to battle, his eyes big with a religious exaltation.
Conroy had been seeking him up and down the Park, hiding and watching, without ever suspecting that his timid cousin had dared to enter one of the forbidden clumps of bushes; and as soon as he saw Don in the open, he raised a view-halloo and bore down on him. Don doubled up his fists and waited. Conroy came shouting gleefully. He did not intend to tease again; he had seen Don going off alone into the Park, and he had been taken with remorse for his persecution. In the bottom of his boy's heart, he admired his quiet relative, though by a common boyish perversion of affection he could never keep his rough hands off Don, trying to plague him out of a superior indifference that was the more irritating because it was so unconscious.
As he came nearer, he saw Don's attitude and stopped. "What's the matter?"
"Keep away from me."
The boy stared. "What's the matter?"
Don backed up against the geraniums. "Keep away from me."
Conroy raised a derisive shout. "Do you want to fight?"
The young David swallowed slowly and shut his teeth on the pale-lipped mutter of a prayer. His cousin crept in on him, grinning, and crouched—intending to wrestle him and roll him on the grass—playfully. Don caught him in the mouth with a blow that knocked him off his balance. He jumped to his feet, white; and Don was waiting for him.
They fought in a boyish fury, wrestling, kicking and scratching; Don even bit his cousin's hand. He was whimpering hysterically; half his blows were going wide; and Conroy struck at his head and face and kicked into his legs. He went down on the grass, but before Conroy could more than pant out "Had enough?" he was up again, fighting like mad; and the more Conroy punished him, the harder he fought, whining like an animal, his face covered with blood. He did not feel the blows that blinded him; and his endurance was so unexpected, and his despairing stubbornness so wild, that it frightened Conroy, and he, too, began to cry.
He tried to dodge Don's onslaughts, but the boy flung himself in, clutching and falling, and tearing as he fell; and Conroy had to defend himself with the most frantically brutal blows. Even then, sobbing horribly and so weak he could scarcely stand, Don staggered in again and again after every rebuff; when he fell at last, he still struggled, fighting despairingly, with the grass.
Conroy, trembling in the knees, sat down at a little distance, wiped his blubbered face and picked at his torn stockings where the kick of Don's heavy shoes had cut them and drawn blood. He looked at Don with scared eyes. "God! God!" Don screamed suddenly, and rising to his hands and knees, he began to crawl toward Conroy, in a frenzy. Conroy jumped to his feet and ran; and as he looked back over his shoulder, he saw Donald, in trying to follow him, topple and fall on his face.
He did not stop running till he came to the Park fountain. There, having washed his face and hands, he sat down shivering with guilty horror, as bewildered as a murderer, unable to make up his mind what to do. He was afraid to go home and leave Don there. He was afraid to go back and face the prospect of more fighting. He had "had enough."
It was fifteen minutes before he got himself around the bed of lilac bushes, and saw Don lying motionless where he had fallen.
"Don!" he called fearfully. "Don! What's the matter?... I didn't mean to. I didn't want to fight ... Don?" He came closer. "I'm not going to touch you. I—you hurt me as much as I did you.... Don? Get up."
Don began to moan. Conroy drew nearer. "You weren't licked," he consoled, in a shameful whisper. "You weren't licked.... I ran away."
Don sobbed: "It—it isn't that. It isn't that."
Conroy knelt beside him and began to wipe his cousin's torn fingers in his wet handkerchief. "I'll never h—hit you———" He choked.
Don, face down, rolled his head from side to side. It wasn't that. He couldn't tell what it was.
It was that his God had suddenly withdrawn into the high heavens and left him; that He had shown Himself not a God of personal mercy and protection, but of distant justice and no partiality of love.
"Come on back, Don," Conroy whispered. "I won't tease you any more. And I won't ever let anyone else."
It was the end of Don's young religiosity, and it was the beginning of a mutual respect and friendship between Conroy and him. Don was incurably solitary in his inclinations, but it became a solitude of two; for Conroy developed a sort of protective devotion that was as dumb as it was dogged. If Don did not come out to join in the games of the other boys, Conroy hunted him down among his books and sat with him over them. If Don stole away into the Park, Conroy followed him up like a young "Man Friday." They played Robinson Crusoe together, and fought Indians in the Park woods, and went on wonderful exploring expeditions in those narrow wilds. Don had a very robust and buoyant spirit that charmed his cousin; and if he had any tendency to morbidness or melancholy, the companionship kept it down.
They worked together at their lessons whenever they could. If there were any fights to be fought, they took them together; and for that reason there were few. They left Miss Morris's academy at the same time, and entered an upper class of the Public School, where they sat side by side—until their teachers separated them for reasons of discipline. And though there was no girlish sentimentality in their friendship, they were David and Jonathan for years.
Their gradual separation began in the High School "forms," because Don's father—being a lawyer—wished him to study classics in preparation for the University and the profession of law, and Conroy's father, a wealthy wholesaler, made him take the "commercial course" in preparation for a business career. They were then fifteen years of age and sixteen, Conroy being the older; and as yet in the great drama of life that was being played around them, they had taken no part. Don's mother was an invalid, and her little daughter Mary had first claim on her affection; his father was a busy man; and Frankie had companions of his own age. When Don was not with Conroy, he was alone with his dog.
But Conroy had a family of brothers and sisters, and a mother and a father who liked to keep their children together in the house. Don was shy with them, and he had an awkwardness of temperament that prevented him from joining heartily in the little parties of young folk that were so common in his uncle's home. His solitary walks with "Dexter" became more frequent—when the pressure of Frankie's rivalry in his studies did not keep him home; for Frankie had left Miss Morris's Select Academy with a five-pointed gold medal inscribed Awarded to "Francis Grayson Gregg for Good Conduct, Punctuality and Progress"; he had entered the High School at the head of his year; and he had closed up on Don so nearly that if the elder brother ever tripped on an examination, now, the younger would surely draw up even with him.
"You're wasting too much time reading trash," their father said to Don, one night when he found the boy on a chair before his mother's bookshelves.
"I've finished my lessons, sir," Don pleaded.
"What's that you're taking?"
It was a copy of Reade's "Put Yourself in His Place." Mr. Gregg drew down his shaggy eyebrows at it. "Put it back," he ordered. "That's no book for a boy. It's no book for anyone. Silly trash! Why don't you read something to improve your mind?" It irritated him to find in Don the same sentimental appetite for novels which his unpractical wife had always had. Frankie had none of it. He had inherited his father's brains.
Don put up the book reluctantly and turned to the door. "And you might as well understand now," his father said, "that I can't send you both to the University. And if Frankie proves himself ... better fitted to profit by it, there'll be no favouritism shown .... in the matter.... Do you hear?"
"Yes, sir," Don said, backing out.
His father opened his newspaper with the satisfaction of having performed his parental duties with a stern impartiality; and Don went back rebelliously to a copy of Spenser's "Faerie Queene" which he had begun to read because he had thought it might be a fairy tale. He had never lost his love for fairy tales.