Babylon Revisited (29 page)

“How about a drink?” he suggested.

We walked into the bar with that defiant feeling that characterizes the day of departure and ordered four Martinis. After one cocktail
a change came over him—he suddenly reached across and slapped my knee with the first joviality I had seen him exhibit for months.

“Did you see that girl in the red tam?” he demanded, “the one with the high color who had the two police dogs down to bid her good-by.”

“She’s pretty,” I agreed.

“I looked her up in the purser’s office and found out that she’s alone. I’m going down to see the steward in a few minutes. We’ll have dinner with her to-night.”

After a while he left me, and within an hour he was walking up and down the deck with her, talking to her in his strong, clear voice. Her red tam was a bright spot of color against the steel-green sea, and from time to time she looked up with a flashing bob of her head, and smiled with amusement and interest, and anticipation. At dinner we had champagne, and were very joyous—afterward Anson ran the pool with infectious gusto, and several people who had seen me with him asked me his name. He and the girl were talking and laughing together on a lounge in the bar when I went to bed.

I saw less of him on the trip than I had hoped. He wanted to arrange a foursome, but there was no one available, so I saw him only at meals. Sometimes, though, he would have a cocktail in the bar, and he told me about the girl in the red tam, and his adventures with her, making them all bizarre and amusing, as he had a way of doing, and I was glad that he was himself again, or at least the self that I knew, and with which I felt at home. I don’t think he was ever happy unless some one was in love with him, responding to him like filings to a magnet, helping him to explain himself, promising him something. What it was I do not know. Perhaps they promised that there would always be women in the world who would spend their brightest, freshest, rarest hours to nurse and protect that superiority he cherished in his heart.

1926

THE FRESHEST BOY
 

It was a hidden Broadway restaurant in the dead of the night, and a brilliant and mysterious group of society people, diplomats and members of the underworld were there. A few minutes ago the sparkling wine had been flowing and a girl had been dancing gaily upon a table, but now the whole crowd were hushed and breathless. All eyes were fixed upon the masked but well-groomed man in the dress suit and opera hat who stood nonchalantly in the door.

“Don’t move, please,” he said, in a well-bred, cultivated voice that had, nevertheless, a ring of steel in it. “This thing in my hand might—go off.”

His glance roved from table to table—fell upon the malignant man higher up with his pale saturnine face, upon Heatherly, the suave secret agent from a foreign power, then rested a little longer, a little more softly perhaps, upon the table where the girl with dark hair and dark tragic eyes sat alone.

“Now that my purpose is accomplished, it might interest you to know who I am.” There was a gleam of expectation in every eye. The breast of the dark-eyed girl heaved faintly and a tiny burst of subtle French perfume rose into the air. “I am none other than that elusive gentleman, Basil Lee, better known as the Shadow.”

Taking off his well-fitting opera hat, he bowed ironically from the waist. Then, like a flash, he turned and was gone into the night.

“You get up to New York only once a month,” Lewis Crum was saying, “and then you have to take a master along.”

Slowly, Basil Lee’s glazed eyes returned from the barns and billboards of the Indiana countryside to the interior of the Broadway Limited. The hypnosis of the swift telegraph poles faded and Lewis Crum’s stolid face took shape against the white slip-cover of the opposite bench.

“I’d just duck the master when I got to New York,” said Basil.

“Yes, you would!”

“I bet I would.”

“You try it and you’ll see.”

“What do you mean saying I’ll see, all the time, Lewis? What’ll I see?”

His very bright dark-blue eyes were at this moment fixed upon his companion with boredom and impatience. The two had nothing in common except their age, which was fifteen, and the lifelong friendship of their fathers—which is less than nothing. Also they were bound from the same Middle-Western city for Basil’s first and Lewis’ second year at the same Eastern school.

But, contrary to all the best traditions, Lewis the veteran was miserable and Basil the neophyte was happy. Lewis hated school. He had grown entirely dependent on the stimulus of a hearty vital mother, and as he felt her slipping farther and farther away from him, he plunged deeper into misery and homesickness. Basil, on the other hand, had lived with such intensity on so many stories of boarding-school life that, far from being homesick, he had a glad feeling of recognition and familiarity. Indeed, it was with some sense of doing the appropriate thing, having the traditional rough-house, that he had thrown Lewis’ comb off the train at Milwaukee last night for no reason at all.

To Lewis, Basil’s ignorant enthusiasm was distasteful—his instinctive attempt to dampen it had contributed to the mutual irritation.

“I’ll tell you what you’ll see,” he said ominously. “They’ll catch you smoking and put you on bounds.”

“No, they won’t, because I won’t be smoking. I’ll be in training for football.”

“Football! Yeah! Football!”

“Honestly, Lewis, you don’t like anything, do you?”

“I don’t like football. I don’t like to go out and get a crack in the eye.” Lewis spoke aggressively, for his mother had canonized all his
timidities as common sense. Basil’s answer, made with what he considered kindly intent, was the sort of remark that creates life-long enmities.

“You’d probably be a lot more popular in school if you played football,” he suggested patronizingly.

Lewis did not consider himself unpopular. He did not think of it in that way at all. He was astounded.

“You wait!” he cried furiously. “They’ll take all that freshness out of you.”

“Clam yourself,” said Basil, coolly plucking at the creases of his first long trousers. “Just clam yourself.”

“I guess everybody knows you were the freshest boy at the Country Day!”

“Clam yourself,” repeated Basil, but with less assurance. “Kindly clam yourself.”

“I guess I know what they had in the school paper about you—”

Basil’s own coolness was no longer perceptible.

“If you don’t clam yourself,” he said darkly, “I’m going to throw your brushes off the train too.”

The enormity of this threat was effective. Lewis sank back in his seat, snorting and muttering, but undoubtedly calmer. His reference had been to one of the most shameful passages in his companion’s life. In a periodical issued by the boys of Basil’s late school there had appeared, under the heading Personals:

“If someone will please poison young Basil, or find some other means to stop his mouth, the school at large and myself will be much obliged.”

The two boys sat there fuming wordlessly at each other. Then, resolutely, Basil tried to re-inter this unfortunate souvenir of the past. All that was behind him now. Perhaps he had been a little fresh, but he was making a new start. After a moment, the memory passed and with it the train and Lewis’ dismal presence—the breath of the East came sweeping over him again with a vast nostalgia. A voice called him out of the fabled world; a man stood beside him with a hand on his sweater-clad shoulder.

“Lee!”

“Yes, sir.”

“It all depends on you now. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right,” the coach said, “go in and win.”

Basil tore the sweater from his stripling form and dashed out on the field. There were two minutes to play and the score was 3 to 0 for the enemy, but at the sight of young Lee, kept out of the game all year by a malicious plan of Dan Haskins, the school bully, and Weasel Weems, his toady, a thrill of hope went over the St. Regis stand.

“33-12-16-22!” barked Midget Brown, the diminutive little quarterback.

It was his signal—

“Oh, gosh!” Basil spoke aloud, forgetting the late unpleasantness. “I wish we’d get there before tomorrow.”

S
T.
R
EGIS
S
CHOOL,
E
ASTCHESTER,

November 18, 19—

“D
EAR
M
OTHER:
There is not much to say today, but I thought I would write you about my allowance. All the boys have a bigger allowance than me, because there are a lot of little things I have to get, such as shoe laces, etc. School is still very nice and am having a fine time, but football is over and there is not much to do. I am going to New York this week to see a show. I do not know yet what it will be, but probably the Quacker Girl or little boy Blue as they are both very good. Dr. Bacon is very nice and there’s a good phycission in the village. No more now as I have to study Algebra.

“Your Affectionate Son,

“B
ASIL
D. L
EE.”

As he put the letter in its envelope, a wizened little boy came into the deserted study hall where he sat and stood staring at him.

“Hello,” said Basil, frowning.

“I been looking for you,” said the little boy, slowly and judicially.
“I looked all over—up in your room and out in the gym, and they said you probably might of sneaked off in here.”

“What do you want?” Basil demanded.

“Hold your horses, Bossy.”

Basil jumped to his feet. The little boy retreated a step.

“Go on, hit me!” he chirped nervously. “Go on, hit me, ’cause I’m just half your size—Bossy.”

Basil winced. “You call me that again and I’ll spank you.”

“No, you won’t spank me. Brick Wales said if you ever touched any of us—”

“But I never did touch any of you.”

“Didn’t you chase a lot of us one day and didn’t Brick Wales—”

“Oh, what do you want?” Basil cried in desperation.

“Doctor Bacon wants you. They sent me after you and somebody said maybe you sneaked in here.”

Basil dropped his letter in his pocket and walked out—the little boy and his invective following him through the door. He traversed a long corridor, muggy with that odor best described as the smell of stale caramels that is so peculiar to boys’ schools, ascended a stairs and knocked at an unexceptional but formidable door.

Doctor Bacon was at his desk. He was a handsome, redheaded Episcopal clergyman of fifty whose original real interest in boys was now tempered by the flustered cynicism which is the fate of all headmasters and settles on them like green mold. There were certain preliminaries before Basil was asked to sit down—gold-rimmed glasses had to be hoisted up from nowhere by a black cord and fixed on Basil to be sure that he was not an impostor; great masses of paper on the desk had to be shuffled through, not in search of anything but as a man nervously shuffles a pack of cards.

“I had a letter from your mother this morning—ah—Basil.” The use of his first name had come to startle Basil. No one else in school had yet called him anything but Bossy or Lee. “She feels that your marks have been poor. I believe you have been sent here at a certain amount of—ah—sacrifice and she expects—”

Basil’s spirit writhed with shame, not at his poor marks but that his financial inadequacy should be so bluntly stated. He knew that he was one of the poorest boys in a rich boys’ school.

Perhaps some dormant sensibility in Doctor Bacon became aware
of his discomfort; he shuffled through the papers once more and began on a new note.

“However, that was not what I sent for you about this afternoon. You applied last week for permission to go to New York on Saturday, to a matinée. Mr. Davis tells me that for almost the first time since school opened you will be off bounds tomorrow.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That is not a good record. However, I would allow you to go to New York if it could be arranged. Unfortunately, no masters are available this Saturday.”

Basil’s mouth dropped ajar. “Why, I—why, Doctor Bacon, I know two parties that are going. Couldn’t I go with one of them?”

Doctor Bacon ran through all his papers very quickly. “Unfortunately, one is composed of slightly older boys and the other group made arrangements some weeks ago.”

“How about the party that’s going to the
Quaker Girl
with Mr. Dunn?”

“It’s that party I speak of. They feel that their arrangements are complete and they have purchased seats together.”

Suddenly Basil understood. At the look in his eye Doctor Bacon went on hurriedly:

“There’s perhaps one thing I can do. Of course there must be several boys in the party so that the expenses of the master can be divided up among all. If you can find two other boys who would like to make up a party, and let me have their names by five o’clock, I’ll send Mr. Rooney with you.”

“Thank you,” Basil said.

Doctor Bacon hesitated. Beneath the cynical incrustations of many years an instinct stirred to look into the unusual case of this boy and find out what made him the most detested boy in school. Among boys and masters there seemed to exist an extraordinary hostility toward him, and though Doctor Bacon had dealt with many sorts of schoolboy crimes, he had neither by himself nor with the aid of trusted sixth-formers been able to lay his hands on its underlying cause. It was probably no single thing, but a combination of things; it was most probably one of those intangible questions of personality. Yet he remembered that when he first saw Basil he had considered him unusually prepossessing.