Loneliness was at least one misery that the afflicted schoolmaster did not have to experience. His colleagues were all attentive to him and tried to relieve the monotony of the hours. Among the older boys were many who came to see him in his rooms and offered their services for reading or for guiding him on walks or for writing at his dictation. He welcomed them all, he gave each one the pleasure of doing something for him and himself took pleasure in the friendly thought, but it soon became evident that there were two or three out of the whole number of volunteers on whom he especially depended. Mr. Randolph, the English teacher, and Mr. Delange, the French teacher, were his most intimate and devoted friends among the masters; but on David even more than on them he seemed to rely for little services. Thus it was David that every morning after breakfast walked with him to chapel; it was David that led him back to his house at the end of the daily fifth-form Latin recitation; it was David that usually conducted him in the afternoons to the athletic grounds. Always an interested observer of the sports, Mr. Dean declared now that he would continue to follow them even if he could not see; and so on almost every pleasant day during the recreation hour he was to be found seated on the piazza of the athletic house that overlooked the running track and the playing field. One boy after another would come and sit beside him and tell him what was going on; in the intervals of their activity ball-players and runners would visit him and receive a word of congratulation for success or of joking reproof for failure; sometimes he would ask his companion of the moment not to enlighten him as to the progress of the game, but to let him guess from the sounds and the shouts what was taking place; his pleasure when he guessed correctly was enthusiastic and touching.
“Try watching a game sometime with your eyes shut,” he suggested to David. “You’d find there’s a certain amount of interest in it. You’ll be surprised to find how successfully ears are capable of substituting for eyes.”
Just then Lester Wallace, who had made a run in the Pythians’ practice game, came up saying, “How are you, Mr. Dean? This is Wallace.”
“Good; that was a fine clean hit of yours just now. I said to David the moment I heard the crack, ‘There goes a base hit.’ Don’t forget that the Pythians need your batting, Wallace.”
“That’s one thing I wanted to ask you about, Mr. Dean.” Wallace glanced at David somewhat sheepishly. “When do you think I’ll get off probation?”
“I wouldn’t undertake to predict about that.” If there was no longer any twinkle behind the dark glasses that Mr. Dean now wore, there was a genial puckering of the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. “But I can tell you perhaps when you’ll have an opportunity to get off probation. The game with the Corinthians is a week from to-day, isn’t it? Well, you come to me in the noon intermission that day, and I’ll give you an oral examination.”
“You don’t think I could get off any earlier?”
“I’m very much afraid, Wallace, that you need all the time I can give you.”
“Haven’t my recitations been better lately, Mr. Dean?”
“Yes, there has been a decided improvement. I’ve noticed it, and I’ve appreciated it, Wallace. For I thought that it was due not only to a regard for your own welfare, but also to a kindly consideration for me.”
He put out his hand gropingly and patted the boy’s leg. David noticed that Wallace flushed and looked momentarily unhappy; then an unpleasant, sulky expression appeared on his face.
“If my mark has improved so much and I go on reciting well in class, I don’t see why I should have to stand an examination.”
“Only because it’s the rule, and we can’t make exceptions. I shall let your work in the classroom count towards your efforts to regain your freedom, but the examination must be important, too.”
Wallace’s acceptance of that decision did not seem to David particularly gracious, nor did the dissatisfied look vanish from his face. He withdrew after a few moments.
Mr. Dean remarked rather sadly to David; “I don’t seem ever quite to get hold of Wallace. There’s something there, but I don’t reach him.”
“He’ll be all right when he’s off probation,” David said. “And I think he really has been working harder; I’ve thought his recitations were much better lately.”
“Yes, there’s no doubt of that, and perhaps it’s my fault that when we meet he’s not more responsive. Every one of us is Dr. Fell to somebody, I suppose, and there’s no use in blaming that somebody for what he can’t help. There, who hit that crack? That must have been a good one.”
“Henshaw—long fly to center; Morris got under it all right. The Corinthians are going out for practice now, Mr. Dean.”
“All right; good luck. Put up a star game at first, so that you can tell me about it when you come in.”
David laughed and departed; looking back, he was glad to see that some one already had taken his place beside Mr. Dean’s chair.
He played well that afternoon and had the satisfaction of being commended by the captain, Treadway, as well as by Mr. Dean. When he came out of the athletic house after dressing, the master was gone; David walked up to the dormitory with Wallace.
“I wish I were off probation now,” Wallace said. “It seems to me Mr. Dean likes to keep me in suspense; this idea of not knowing until the day of the game whether I can play or not!”
“Oh, you’ll be able to play,” David assured him. “You’ve been doing well in class lately; there’s no doubt about your getting through the examination. If you want me to help you at all, I’ll be glad to do it.”
“I guess I can get off probation without your help,” said Wallace ungraciously.
“Excuse me for speaking,” replied David, and he walked on, flushed and silent.
Wallace spoke after a moment. “Hold on, Dave; don’t be so short with a fellow. I didn’t mean to speak as I did. It was just that I—well, I don’t want you to feel that I need to be helped all the time—as if I couldn’t do anything for myself.”
He looked at the ground and seemed in spite of his words somewhat shamefaced. But David paid no heed to that; his response to the appeal was immediate.
“Of course you can do anything you set your mind to,” he said heartily, linking arms with Wallace. “And I should think you would feel I was a fresh, conceited lobster to come butting in always as if I thought you couldn’t get along without me. The recitations you’ve been giving lately have been as good as any one’s; and of course you ought to have all the credit yourself when you get off probation. Your father will be awfully pleased.”
“Oh, I guess he won’t care. Just so long as I get through my examinations—that’s all that he takes any interest in.”
“He probably takes more interest than you think—of course he does—an old St. Timothy’s boy himself!”
“Oh, well, I dare say.” For some reason Wallace was out of sorts. He added, however, with more spirit: “Of course he’d like to see me play on the nine. He was on it when he was here. I wish I could always be sure of lining them out the way I did to-day.”
They talked baseball during the rest of the walk, and Wallace’s spirits seemed to improve.
Indeed, as the days went on David could see no reason for Wallace’s moodiness. On the ball field Wallace was playing so brilliantly and received from team mates and spectators so much appreciation that he had no reason to feel dissatisfied; never had his popularity and importance in the school been greater. And so far as scholarship was concerned, the improvement that he was making was notable. In mathematics, French, and English he had never been under any disqualifications, but he now was taking rank among the first in the class. In Latin, the study in which he had always been weak and indifferent, his translations had become surprisingly fluent and correct. He sat by himself in a corner of the recitation room, holding his book down between his knees and bending over it in an attitude of supreme concentration; his nearest neighbor seldom saw him raise his eyes and never had a glimpse of the text over which he pored. When Mr. Dean called on him, he rose and, raising the book in his arms and with bent head, read the Latin lines, then slowly but accurately translated, scarcely ever stumbling over a word. Mr. Dean had a variety of commendatory expressions for his work—“Good,” “Very well rendered indeed,” “Good idiomatic English—the kind of translation I like; I wish some of you other fellows would not be so slavishly literal.” Wallace would sit down with a face unresponsive to such comments and would again huddle over his book with absorbed attention.
David and some of the other fellows commented among themselves upon those recitations.
“I didn’t know Lester was so bright,” said Monroe. “I guess there’s nothing that boy can’t do if he puts his mind to it.”
“I guess there isn’t,” David agreed loyally. “He gets it from his father; Dr. Wallace is a wonder.”
So impressive was the sudden manifestation of Wallace’s intellectual prowess and so widely heralded the report of it that he was elected into the Pen and Ink Society, an organization of boys with scholarly and literary inclinations. The news of this election, however, he took with bad grace; he declared himself entirely out of sympathy with the purposes of the institution and expressed violently a resolve not to be drafted into the ranks of the “high-brows.” The dejected emissaries of the Pen and Ink had to report to their society that Wallace had declined the election without even seeming sensible of the honor that had been done him, and the popularity that Wallace had achieved suffered somewhat in consequence. Some of the aggrieved members told Ruth Davenport of the slight that had been put on their society, and Ruth, when next she met Wallace, took him to task for it.
“Why,” she asked, “did you want to be so grouchy?”
“I wasn’t grouchy,” Wallace replied, though his manner at the moment might have been so described. “I just felt I didn’t belong in that crowd.”
“You might have shown them you appreciated the honor.”
“Oh, I might have if I’d felt I deserved it.”
“If you’d only said something like that to them!”
“Well, I didn’t deserve it, and I knew it better than they did; and I didn’t want to be bothered.” He looked past Ruth with an expression at once discontented and defiant.
“You’re an awfully funny person.” Ruth’s eyes twinkled and her lips curved into a smile. “You’re so modest that you think you’re not good enough for them, and yet you make them think they’re not good enough for you!”
He did not respond to her gayety, but said in a rather surly voice: “I don’t care what they think. I’m interested in baseball, not in silly scribblings.”
The bell rang, summoning him to the schoolroom, and Ruth walked away, feeling that she had been rebuffed by one of her friends.
It was impossible for her, however, and for such members of the Pen and Ink as were daily spectators of the Pythians’ baseball practice, not to admire Wallace’s playing, not to be enchanted by the speed and accuracy of his throwing, the cleanness of his fielding, and the strength and sureness of his batting. “The best infielder in the school,” the fellows said; “the best infielder there’s ever been in the school,” asserted the younger enthusiasts, as if from a fullness of knowledge. Any way, Ruth and even the most incensed members of the scorned society felt as they watched his enviable performances that they must forgive much to the possessor of such talent—and sighed in their different ways over his inaccessibility to advances.
“You’ve certainly got to get off probation,” said Henshaw to Wallace the day before the game.
“Oh, I’ll get off all right,” Wallace assured him. “I’m to have a special oral examination to-morrow at noon. You can count on me.”
The fifth-form Latin recitation came at the hour immediately preceding that set for Wallace’s test. On the way to the classroom he showed annoyance and irritation to those who crowded round him to express their eager wishes for his success. “You needn’t hang about and wait for news,” he said when Hudson, the Pythian short-stop, had hoped that the suspense would not last long. “I’ll be all right, and I don’t want a gang looking round when I come out.”
Hudson dropped back and remarked to David that he was afraid Wallace’s nerves were pretty much on edge.
At the end of the recitation hour, while all the other fellows were moving toward the door, Wallace kept his seat at the back of the room. Mr. Dean asked David to stop and speak with him a moment; he told him that Wallace’s examination would last about fifteen minutes, and that then he would as usual be glad to have David’s assistance in walking home. So David returned to the schoolroom and proceeded to work on the problems in algebra assigned for the afternoon. He had finished one and was halfway through another when a glance at the clock told him that it was time to be going to Mr. Dean’s assistance—and also, no doubt, to Wallace’s relief.
The examination was still proceeding when he entered the classroom and sat down near the door. Wallace had moved forward and was occupying a seat immediately under Mr. Dean; he looked up, startled, when David appeared and then at once huddled himself over his book, which he entirely embraced with arms and knees. He continued in a rather mumbling and hesitating voice with his translation, but the halting utterance did not disguise the accuracy of the rendering; David, listening, was glad to be assured that Wallace was acquitting himself so brilliantly. Mr. Dean interrupted the translation after a moment to say:
“Is that you, David?”
“Yes, right here,” David answered.
“Lester and I will be finished in a few moments. We won’t keep you waiting long.”
“If it’s just about walking home, Mr. Dean,” Wallace said, “David needn’t stay; I shall be glad to walk home with you if you’ll let me.” He spoke with eagerness, and Mr. Dean in his reply showed pleasure.
“Thank you. All right, David; I won’t detain you then any longer.”
As David departed he felt that Wallace had found his presence unwelcome, and he was glad to remove himself from his position of involuntary listener and critic. Besides, he could make good use of the time in finishing his algebra exercises.
He returned to the schoolroom and was hard at work when Wallace entered, passed him with brisk steps crying, “I’m all right; off probation!” and, opening his desk, which was just behind David’s, tossed his book into it. Then, without waiting for any congratulations, Wallace hurried out to join Mr. Dean.
David, to his annoyance and perplexity, found that he had gone astray in some of his processes and that his solution was wrong. Inspection showed him where he had blundered; he opened his desk and looked for his eraser. It was not there, and he remembered having lent it to Wallace the night before. He got up and opened Wallace’s desk; the confusion of books and papers daunted him, but he proceeded to search. Then the topmost book, the one that Wallace had deposited there a few moments before, arrested his attention; it was not the edition of Vergil that the class used. He opened it out of curiosity and stood there gazing at its pages with a stricken interest.
The book was of that variety known in St. Timothy’s parlance as a “trot.” Alternating with the lines of Latin text were lines of English translation. The correctness and fluency of Wallace’s recitations were explained. So also was his huddling over his book, his shielding it so carefully from any one’s gaze.
David put the book down and closed the desk without carrying any further the search for the eraser.