LEAVE-TAKING

The short Easter vacation, during which Tony had visited Jimmie, had come and gone, and our friends were settled down again into the routine of the spring term. For the time being, much to the discomfort of all concerned, the old crowd was broken up. Tony and Kit did not even speak to each other, so that Jimmie had a hard time keeping on friendly terms with them both.

The winter had long since broken completely. Long lazy days were come again when the sea glistened like glass under shining skies and the mounting sun was rapidly warming the earth into green good humor. The fields were dotted in the afternoons with a dozen developing baseball teams composed of white clad, red-capped boys. Boats, too, heavily manned by members of the rival school clubs, sped out of the little harbor tucked under Strathsey Neck, and, plied by their happy crews, went scudding on half-holidays up the River or boldly out past Deigr Light into the open ocean. It was a happy term at Deal: boys and masters expanded in the genial sunshine, and for the most part the stress of the long winter term problems and discipline was wholly relaxed. Lawrence and Deering threw themselves into baseball, worked fairly faithfully at their books, and thus kept themselves happy and contented. Kit Wilson was coaching one of the younger teams on the north field, so that they did not come in contact with him very frequently. Jimmie would go to his rooms often in the evening, but he came no more to Number Five study.

Kit had said nothing about his affair with Finch; but, as he expected, his rooms were disturbed no more. Finch, terrified by discovery and the fear of exposure, for a long time abandoned his vandalism entirely. His conscience was troubled by the fact that he had lied to Tony, but less perhaps than he would have been disturbed if Tony knew the truth. There was on both his and Tony’s part a certain sense of strain in their friendly relations, which Tony, however, tried to ignore. He believed of course that Finch had told him the truth about the episode in Wilson’s room and that Wilson had simply been mistaken; but after Kit’s open break with him, he saw no way to set things right.

This troubled him a great deal and cast a gloom over much of that bright spring term that otherwise might have been so happy. Each boy felt the loss of the other’s friendship keenly, but both were impulsive, both felt themselves right, both had been stung to the quick by the other’s attitude. Time, as often happens, widened the breach.

One day in Fifth English they were reading As You Like It, and it fell to Kit to read the lines of Amiens’ song in the second act:

“Heigh-ho! sing heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most love merely folly.

“Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,

Thou dost not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot:

Though thou the waters warp,

Thy sting is not so sharp
As friend remembered not.”

As he got toward the end of the lines, his voice almost broke. Stenton, realizing with quick sympathy that the song had taken on for him some keen personal meaning, passed on the reading immediately to another boy. Tony sat in his seat flushed and uncomfortable; for him also the verse had intense meaning. He longed to look up and catch Kit’s eye, and then join him after class and say boldly how foolish he felt their coolness was. But he did not do so. He felt he never could do so. Kit had been too unfair, too bitter—the advance must come from him.

Suddenly one day, in the midst of all this intense life and activity of school so absorbing to our boys, there came a word to Tony that was rudely and without warning to take him out of it. The message came in the form of a letter from his grandfather bidding him come home at once.

“It will be bad news to you, my dear boy,” he wrote, “but your unfortunate father’s business venture has been an absolute failure; he has been very ill and is only just now on the road to recovery, and your poor mother has fallen a victim at last to the worry and strain. She wants you, and the doctor and I think it best for you to come. So you must do so at once, as I am writing to the Head Master. I don’t know, Anthony, whether we shall be able or not to send you back next year. We poor people of the south, when Fortune turns against us, are pretty well down and out. You have made a good record at school, and I do not doubt but that Doctor Forester will promote you to the Sixth Form next year, should we be able to send you back, even if you do lose these two months. But you must come now, and at once. Telegraph me the day and hour and I will have Sambo meet you at the Junction.

“Your affectionate grandfather,

“Basil Deering.”

Poor Tony read this letter over and over before he could clearly take it in. He knew something of old of his reckless father’s terrible propensity to indulge in wild-cat speculation, of the disaster and trouble it had brought upon the family at Low Deering before. And now too his mother was ill! Of course, of course, he must go home. He fumbled in his drawer and found a time-table. Yes, he could leave that night. And yet—he paused, with the letter in his hand—it was like a sentence of banishment: to leave school now in the middle of the best term of the year, and with so many things in which he was interested at loose ends! He could not believe it really meant that; it could not be true. And perhaps never to return! He looked again at his letter, and the old general’s words made him sick at heart. Never again to race up and down that hillside, to look out upon that splendid sea; never again to swagger about the campus with his chums in the old glad, happy, self-important way! No, no, he could not bear that it should mean that! The hot tears welled in his eyes,—but he brushed them away. Of course, his mother needed him. He had gone through before those agonizing family crises, had seen his tender patient mother struggle bravely against his father’s bad moods and dark despair. He knew that indeed she must have collapsed when his grandfather sent for him and she permitted it.

He ran over to the Rectory and found the Doctor in his study. He too had just been reading a letter from General Deering.

He clasped Tony’s hand in his strong affectionate grip. “I am sorry for you, my boy.... Yes, I have just been reading a letter from your grandfather. There is no choice but for you to go at once.”

“I can leave on the ten o’clock from Monday Port, to-night, sir,” said Tony, “and catch the midnight express at Coventry, which will get me home the next evening.”

“Doubtless that is the best plan,” the Doctor agreed. “I don’t think, from what the General tells me, that you need worry about your mother’s immediate condition. But undoubtedly you are needed. I am very sorry that you should lose these two months, but you can keep up your work at home and there is no reason why you should not make the Sixth comfortably in September.”

“I think I could do that, sir,” replied Tony, “but my grandfather says there is some doubt about—about their being able to send me back next year.”

“Yes, yes, he writes that to me; but you are to come, nevertheless. We will arrange that. I hope the financial difficulties will straighten out satisfactorily, but if worst comes to worst and they should not, why there are any number of ways that we can provide for you. There is always a scholarship fund rusting in the bank,—ripening, I had better say, for just some such occasion. I fancy, even, that the school would be willing to trust you for your tuition. But one thing is quite settled: you are to return. And I will make that clear to Basil—to your grandfather.”

“Thank you, sir; you’ve been mighty good to me.”

“You have been mighty good to us—mighty good for us, I may say,—my boy.... Good-bye now, for the present.... And God bless you.”

In a moment or so Tony was gone. He found Jimmie, Charlie Gordon, Teddy Lansing, and told them the news. And then, after a few hasty farewells, went to his rooms with Jimmie to pack. It was then late in the afternoon. The packing was a sad business, for he felt he must take everything. He would be away five months; perhaps, despite the Doctor’s kind prophecy, for good. As this possibility occurred to him, he would stand now and then in the middle of the room, with a coat or hat or what not in his hands, and feel it was simply impossible to go on. Tears would start in his eyes and trickle down his cheeks. He had always liked the school, even in his bad moods he had been loyal; but he had not known, he had not realized, as few boys do at the time, how the school had become a part of his very life, how intensely his affections were centered there. And then—Mr. Morris; the fellows, Jimmie, Teddy, Charlie, Kit—it would be hard to leave without saying good-bye to Kit—, Reggie!

He turned to Jimmie who had come in at the moment with his arms full of Tony’s belongings that he had collected from various parts of the school, locker rooms and the like. “Excuse me for a little while, Jimmie old boy; I’ve got to run over and see Reggie. I haven’t told him yet.” Tony had a pang of regret that he had seen so little of Reggie of late, “I’ll be back before long.”

“All right,” said Jimmie dolefully. “I’ll go on with the packing, if you don’t mind. Don’t be long.”

“I won’t,” said Tony.

He found Carroll fortunately in his own room in the Old School. For once Reginald was studying, and Tony could scarcely remember when he had seen him so engaged. But the Sixth Former closed his Horace with relief as he recognized his visitor and kicked out a chair for him to sit down. “Well, I am certainly glad you have come. Heaven knows how long I would have kept at that futile exercise, if it had not been pleasantly interrupted. But what’s up, my boy, you look as if you had seen a ghost?”

Tony sat down on the chair that Carroll had pushed out. “I have, Reggie,” he said, “I have just got a letter from home; worse luck. My mother’s ill, and I have to start south to-night.”

“Jove, that is hard luck! When shall you get back, do you suppose?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think my mother is dangerously ill, but she wants me. There’s been a mess about money too. The old governor has written, and says I may not get back at all—not this term any way.”

“Not this term!” Reggie jumped up quickly, all the habitual languor of his attitude and movements gone, and strode over to the window.

“No, I’m afraid not, Reggie.”

“Why—why—I’ll be gone next term, boy.”

“I know, old man.”

For a moment Carroll turned his back to Tony and looked out of the window into the deepening twilight, and was silent. There was a lump in his throat that kept him from speaking.

“I’ve only a few minutes, Reggie, old boy,” said Tony, at last. “I am leaving in an hour and I am only half packed. I’ve got to say good-bye.”

Carroll turned at this: a pathetic smile was on his lips. “It has come so suddenly, boy ... it’s kind of taken the wind out of my sails.” He came over then and took Tony’s hand in his. “Tonio, ... I can’t say good-bye.... You’ll write to me ... you will come back surely.... I’ll be at Kingsbridge and often back at school.”

“I hope so, Reggie.”

“You don’t know, boy,” Reggie went on, still holding Tony’s hand, “I can’t tell you what your being here has meant for me—you and Bill. We haven’t seen each other much this year, and I reckon I’ve often seemed to you a poor sort of friend ... but, to put it poetically, old chap, ... the light o’ my heart goes out with you.”

Tony gripped the hand in his tightly at this. There was a lump in his throat too.

“Good-bye, Reggie.... I will write, and you be sure to write to me. Tell me all that’s going on.... Have an eye on Finch, will you? Poor duffer!”

“Poor duffer, indeed!” said Carroll, and then added, “Poor me!” Their hands clasped tightly, and then Tony was gone.

Reggie stood for a long time just as Tony had left him. “One by one the lamps go out,” he murmured, quoting a line from one of his own verses. He sighed. “So runs, so runs the world away....” There was a queer sharp pain at his heart. He sat down at last and opened his Horace again, and began to read, but the words conveyed no sense to his mind. He threw his arms out once, and whispered softly, pathetically, “Oh, Tony, Tony.... God bless you, boy; God bless you!”

Back in Number Five Jimmie and Tony were absorbed in the last stages of the packing. Morris, to whom Tony had explained the occasion of his going, had come in and was helping them. And his presence went a great way to cheer them up, for Morris refused for an instant, even in his own mind, to consider the possibility of Deering not coming back. He eased off their good-byes, and sent Lawrence over to cheer up Carroll, whom he knew would feel it more than the rest, for it was good-bye to Tony for him as he was in the Sixth and would be at Kingsbridge next year when Tony returned.

Deering said good-bye to Finch, quickly, quietly, he had time for little explanation. Finch said nothing, but died of despair within.

On the way down the corridor Tony passed Kit, a generous word was on his lips, their eyes met for a second, but Kit looked quickly away, and Tony passed on. The opportunity for a reconciliation was gone. Morris drove in to Monday Port with the boy and saw him off on the way-train for Coventry. With persistent tact, he continued to treat the parting as only a temporary one, and refused himself the melancholy pleasure of saying much to his young friend that was in his heart and that Tony might have been glad to hear. It was better so, thought Morris. The kind things could be written, if the need came.

There was a quick, short, strong grip of their hands at last, and Tony climbed into the train. He stowed his things in the empty car, and then went and stood on the rear platform and waved his hand to Morris as the train pulled out of the little station, and strained his eyes to see the last of the master’s patient, kindly friendly figure until darkness blotted out the vision. The train was rushing through the outskirts of the little town. Beyond the limits it ascended a steep grade and ran along a high level plateau for a way, and thence Tony caught a glimpse of the lights of the school shining brightly from the far-away hill, wafting him, it seemed, a friendly good-bye across the dark. Suddenly the train plunged into a narrow cut in a hill and Deering could see the lights of Deal no more.

At Coventry he had a dreary wait for half-an-hour until the midnight express for the south lumbered in and stopped on signal. As soon as he had boarded the through train, he got into his berth, for he was worn out with the wearisome journey from Monday Port and with the excitement of the last seven hours. But he could not sleep for a long time. When at last he did fall into a fitful slumber, constantly disturbed by the jolts and jars of the rushing train, it was to dream bad dreams. Once it seemed to him, in the dazed state between sleeping and waking, that he was lying in his little bed at Low Deering, that he was still a little boy of fourteen, and that the last four years at Deal had been only a dream....

At Low Deering Tony found things almost as bad as he had feared. His father, a genial, charming, irresponsible creature—the unaccountable wild olive that grows now and then on the stock of the good olive tree—had rather more deeply than usual—for the same sort of thing had happened before—plunged his family into distress. He had ventured all his available capital and more that he had borrowed, on the security of his extravagant hopes and good intentions, from his wife; staked it in a case where he stood to win twenty-fold or quite overwhelmingly lose; and, as not unfrequently happens, had lost. Then had followed, as Tony could remember the horror of it all at an earlier period of his boyhood, a trying disappearance and a return in a mood of black melancholy and idle remorse.

But the worst was over by the time he reached home. Victor Deering, thanks to his father’s stern but tender patience and his wife’s unfailing much-tried devotion, was slowly recovering his normal health, his irrepressible spirits, his habitual weaving of futile plans and nursing of quixotic hopes. But the process this time had cost his family a good deal more than its meager income could pay for and had sacrificed Mrs. Deering’s health to worry and distress. For weeks she had been lying in a state of nervous exhaustion, from which the physician at last thought she might be rallied if her wish were granted and Tony, her only child, might be with her. And so he had been sent for.

During those two hot months of the southern spring Tony devoted himself to his mother, a devotion that was only relaxed when later, the old general having scraped together enough for the purpose, the family removed for the summer to the cooler climate of a resort in the North Carolina mountains. The mother grieved not a little for her boy’s interrupted school days—she guessed at the sacrifice Tony’s cheerfulness hid,—but Tony and the General knew that his return had saved her health if not her life.

Tony had been separated a great deal from his family since he had gone north to school, so that, after the first homesickness for Deal was over, he began to be deeply interested again in the old scenes and familiar friends of his early boyhood: the easy-going, ill-managed old plantation with its extensive sugar industry bringing in such income as they had; the little hill on which stood the house of Low Deering, low, white and great galleried; the sleepy bayou that stretched away below to the wild and beautiful jungle, a marshy live-oak forest, picturesquely hung with the heavy lace of the gray Spanish moss and the delicate purple of the wild wistaria; the inky black darkies, relics of ante-bellum days; the few families of similar decaying plantations in the neighborhood.

Later in the summer at Bald Rock in North Carolina, at the hotel to which their diminutive cottage was attached, there were young people again—boys to play baseball and climb the near by mountains with, girls with whom to dance at the Saturday night hops on the great gallery of the hotel. Then too there was his father. Despite an inner disapproval that Tony could not help feeling for his father’s irresponsible doings, for the trouble he now and then brought so deeply, perhaps unwittingly, upon them all, Tony enjoyed his father immensely. If he himself had inherited his strong sense of honor and his manly grip on life from his grandfather, and the inner patient tenderness we have sometimes noted in him from his mother, it was from his father that his charm, his quick and ready sympathy, his genial grace had come.

After the terrible six months he had given them, Victor Deering could not have done more to atone than he was whole-heartedly trying to do. It was characteristic of him, for he deeply appreciated what Deal School had done for Tony, that his repentance should have caused him to suggest to the old general that his own patrimony, hoarded by the head of the house against a rainy day, should be made over to Tony at once, and the income, the capital if necessary, be applied to completing his education at Deal and later on at Kingsbridge. General Deering took his son at his word. Victor was only too eager to promise from then on steadfast attention to the plantation, which, better managed, was capable still of recouping their fortunes and furnishing them with a living. So it began to look bright, as Tony wrote to Jimmie Lawrence, for his return to school, and without any question of taking advantage of scholarships or such aid as the Head had so kindly offered. That offer rankled, unjustly as he knew, in the old aristocrat’s mind. He was determined Tony should have no such humiliation to face.

Of the school in these days of Tony’s enforced exile, a glimpse shall be had through the medium of Jimmie Lawrence’s letters, for, of course, the two boys had written each other with some regularity.

“Deal School: May 10th.

“Ever affectionately,

“Jimmie.”

In June there came another letter that interested Tony very much.

“Reggie has pulled both the Latin and the Poetry Prizes. Even the Gumshoe thawed a trifle and shook hands with him as he came down from the platform on Prize Day, with a set of Browning in his arms and the Jackson medal in his inside pocket. He’s so blamed clever that he has got a cum laude. Bill beams with pride over him. The President of Kingsbridge, a funny old chap who talks through his nose and has a wit as keen as a razor, made us a bully talk, and the Doctor announced the prefects for next year—curiously enough he said the Head Prefect will not be appointed until the opening of school in September. We all suppose, of course, that that means you, and that it is only postponed until it is certain that you are coming back. The other prefects will be Teddy, Gordon Powel, Doc Thorn, Ned Clavering and myself. I had hoped Kit would be one, but he’s been too independent I guess. It’s a pretty good lot of fellows, I think, though I say it as shouldn’t, and with you at the head, we ought to run things very much as we want to next year....”

Tony had scarcely thought of the Head Prefectship since he had left school. He believed that there were others better fitted for it than himself and who more deserved it. The fact that he was President of the Dealonian made him an obvious candidate, of course; and certainly if the authorities thought him up to the position he would be glad to have it. The possibility from this time on added to the keenness with which he looked forward to his return in September.