City Boy (42 page)

Herbie proclaimed, “Cliff Block, you have appeared on Company Street in clothes too small for you. In the water you must go!”

At once the Seniors grasped the unresisting head counselor by the arms and legs, swung him back and forth twice, then pitched him in. The splash wet them all. The spectators cheered.

Mrs. Gloster clapped her hands. “What fun! I don't see Raymond. I hope he's here.” She lifted her voice and called, “ Ray-
mond
! Where are you?” This served to turn everybody's eyes on her—and on Mr. Gauss. Raymond answered thinly, from far down the beach, “Here I am, Mother!”

But his cry was ignored. Herbie came striding down the dock shouting, “There's Herbie Bookbinder, men, wearing white flannels before sundown. Grab him!”

The thought of seizing Mr. Gauss was so audacious that the whole camp gasped. But the Seniors, with whoops and howls, came trampling after the fat boy, their steps drumming on the hollow wooden dock. The camp owner quailed, but stood his ground. A few feet from him the boys stopped short, and began fidgeting and murmuring.

“Now, lads,” said Mr. Gauss, smiling with all his might, “you know an old Manitou tradition excludes the real Skipper from Campers' Day. I wish I could join the fun, but as you see I'm here with a lady, and I'm afraid I can't join you.”

Mrs. Gloster exclaimed quickly, “Oh, please don't let
me
interfere,” and fell away from his side several paces, leaving him quite alone, and raising an uneasy laugh among the boys.

“Grab him, I say!” shouted Herbie. But no one moved toward the camp owner.

“Now, Herbie,” said Mr. Gauss, “you've had your fun and you've done very well, I understand. And it's five o'clock, so let's have no more of this foolery. Hand me that headdress. You're just Herbie Bookbinder again.”

Herbie glanced at his watch, and brandished it for all the larger boys to see.

“It's
three minutes to five,
” he bawled, “and I'm still Mr. Gauss by Mr. Gauss's own rules. And I say throw Herbie Bookbinder in the lake!”

The close-pressed ranks of the Seniors divided as a smaller figure thrust to the front. It was Ted, his long beak quivering, his birdlike eyes glaring. “Didn't you big lugs hear the Skipper's orders?” he roared. “Come on, let's get him!” He dived for Mr. Gauss's legs.

And Mr. Gauss, in his panicky fear of the water, made a dreadful mistake. He turned and ran.

Instantly he had twenty pursuers. The yellowest hound will chase anything that flees. With yaps and hoots, the Seniors ran after him and laid violent hands on him before he had gone ten yards. In a moment he was struggling in the air, held aloft by a dozen pairs of strong arms.

“In the water he must go,

My fair Gussiel”

chanted his captors.

Alas for symbolic prestige!

Mr. Gauss did not react well in this adversity. As the boys bore him toward the water he squirmed, bucked, and yelled, “Sandy! Sandy! Blow your whistle! Stop them! Put me down, you foolish boys! SAN-DEE!”

To the boys his behavior seemed queer, for they knew nothing of his terror of the water. But in becoming a wriggling victim Mr. Gauss lost any chance he might have had of rescuing himself, and became a simple figure of fun. Uncle Sandy was in a poor position to come to his aid. He was himself clambering up the ladder out of the lake. It is true that he was nearly up on the dock when the bearers of Mr. Gauss were still far from the edge. He might perhaps have jumped forward, dripping as he was, and saved his master by shouting and charging at the group. But strange to tell, as soon as his nearsighted eyes took in what was happening he lost his footing on the ladder—through sheer surprise, he swore a hundred times in after years—and fell back into the water helplessly.

Mr. Gauss entered the most forceful objections to the very last—objections in the form of kicks, punches, shrieks, threats, and an amount of writhing that was remarkable in a man of his years and weight. A few feet from the edge of the dock the boys actually lost their hold on the legs of the white-clad, struggling figure. Mr. Gauss gained temporary footing on the wooden dock and balked like a maddened elephant. But Immediately a cluster of boys' arms whisked his feet into the air once more. And with no further ado, omitting the ceremony of swinging, his captors rushed him to the edge and dumped him in.

The camp owner struck the water stomach first with a horrid
splat,
and sank out of sight. He bobbed up again in a few seconds, gurgling, and flailing so furiously that he seemed to have ten arms and legs.

“It's five o'clock, guys! Campers' Day is over!” yelled Herbie, dashing his feather headdress to the dock. “Run like hell!”

All the boys stampeded up the path away from the lake. So quickly did they evacuate that by the time Uncle Sandy hauled his bedraggled, shuddering, choking employer up the ladder, the camp owner had but one spectator of his misery—Mrs. Gloster, who was leaning against a tree, holding her sides in an agony of giggling. Mr. Gauss mechanically picked up the feather headdress from the dock and put it on his head.

“Ye gods, Skipper, what are you doing?” exclaimed Uncle Sandy.

The camp owner looked at him foggily, then snatched the headdress off. He became aware of Mrs. Gloster's laughter, echoing across the water. He smiled and walked down the dock, his shirt clinging, his white flannel trousers making slushy noises with each step. “You see, Mrs. Gloster,” he said as he approached the lady, with a gray laugh that was rather horrible to hear, “we do inculcate the democratic spirit at Manitou.”

On Company Street there was light, and gladness, and joy, and honor. Herbie Bookbinder and Cliff Block were marched up and down by a select committee of eminent athletes—not including Lenie—with placards around their necks proclaiming that they had received the sublime and ultimate glory of Manitou: in the last hours of the summer, they had been initiated into the Royal Order of Gooferdusters.

T
he glass of the train window was cold against Herbie's forehead as he took his last long look at the hills among which Camp Manitou was hidden. Not only regret kept his eyes fastened on the pleasant scenes he was leaving, but embarrassment, for tears were running down his cheeks. He had quite broken down on the railway platform when Uncle Irish had led both camps in the singing of “Bulldog, Bulldog,” as the train appeared around a bend in the distance and came puffing toward them, growing bigger with each puff. The pathos had overwhelmed him, but he had managed to repress the water in his eyes until he could scramble into a seat in the railroad car and turn his face to the window. Now he was giving way freely.

Cliff, who knew his cousin's weakness well enough after years of hearing him snivel in the darkness of movie houses, sat beside him as a screen. Cliff was not moved by the departure. The one thing he regretted in all of Manitou was Clever Sam, and in washing the horse he had expressed his emotion fully. His common sense told him that Clever Sam could find no place in the city, and since the separation was not to be avoided, he saw no sense in crying over it.

The curious part of it was that Herbie had not even the horse to regret. He was thoroughly, unreservedly happy at quitting Mr. Gauss's camp. But that was not the point. This was a parting, and there had been nostalgic music and a puffing train, and Herbie could not deprive himself of the luxury of sentiment. So he sat with his face pressed to the dirty pane, mourning, and enjoying the mourning all the more because he had nothing whatever to mourn for.

This is thought to be a feminine trait, but you will find it among boys and men, too, disguised as good-natured brusqueness in those less volatile than Herbie. All it requires is an active imagination which can wring out of any farewell the sense that it is a little bit of death, and can overlook, for the moment, the fact that some parts of life are much better dead and done with. You will see prep-school lads misty-eyed at leaving institutions where they have been wretched, and a clerk sniffling to write his last entry in the ledger of an office where he has been hardly more than a dog. It is folly, but a private, pleasant little folly. There is this much harm in it, however: it creates delusions. Herbie was persuaded now that he had always loved Manitou, and that he couldn't wait to return. There were many children on the train succumbing to the same foolishness. The matter-of-fact ones like Cliff were a minority. Do you know, a few seats away poor Ted also had his face to the window? There will always be summer camps, so long as the owners have the sagacity to make the children sing the camp song as the homebound train comes into the station.

Herbie was enjoying his grief so much that he was disappointed when it started to wane like the glow from an ice-cream soda, after only a few minutes. He began using devices to work it up and keep it alive, such as humming “Bulldog, Bulldog” and taps dismally to himself, and reviewing every detail of his final hours at camp. It will be remembered that he did no such thing when he was overcome upon leaving his parents two months ago, but was glad to be distracted from his emotion as soon as possible. True sorrow is painful. Sham sorrow compares to it as riding down a roller coaster does to falling off a roof. The thrill is there, but not the cost. Just as a child will yell in terror as the roller coaster dives, and then beg another ride, so sentimentalists like Herbie do their best to keep on weeping when the sadness is synthetic. They do not, of course, know what they are doing. Herbie would have taken his oath that he was in terrible misery.

The pictures he recalled were pathetic enough to keep the waterworks pumping for a while.

After the revenge on Mr. Gauss and the inconceivable grandeur of becoming a Gooferduster, he had wandered down to the deserted lake front to enjoy the last sunset and to think melancholy thoughts. Mindful of a last-minute comparison of sunburns in the bunk before dinner, when he had turned out several shades paler than the others, Herbie sat on a rock by the still water, took off his shirt, and bared his chest to the yellow rays of the descending sun. A year of exposure to such feeble light would not have tanned him one atom, but he felt like a brawny outdoors man in doing it, and economical, too. While others were frittering away these precious last seconds of sunlight, he was using them.

As he sat gazing at the lake and trying to screw his mood up to a sublime level, he perceived something strange. Felicia and Lucille were in a canoe together, paddling slowly around the promontory that hid the girls' dock from view. Canoeing at sunset was a delight usually reserved for counselors off duty, but evidently Aunt Tillie had decided to bestow it on the girls this last evening in order to seal the book of summer with a pleasant memory, for here came several other canoes behind the first, fanning out on the lake this way and that.

“Hi, Fleece! Hi, Lucille!” Herbie called, waving his arms. His voice carried easily over the water. The girls saw him and began paddling vigorously toward him.

The boy was at a loss to understand this new companionship between his sister and his love, for in the tug of war over Lennie they had come to despise each other with feminine vigor. Neither of them had ever admitted that there had been a contest, but it had been a real, bitter struggle all the same. As the canoe drew near he could hear them chatting amiably. The mystery was partly cleared when the canoe grated to a stop on the shore a few feet from him, and Yishy Gabelson stepped out of the bushes to haul the canoe high out of the water and graciously help Felicia alight.

The fact is that a last-minute romance had kindled between his sister and Yishy at the Mardi Gras dance, and it burned the more brightly for the shortness of time left to enjoy it. Felicia's hankering for the younger Lennie, engendered mostly by pique at seeing him drift out of his normal attitude of adoration, had been a degrading, dog-in-the-manger sort of feeling. Yishy was almost three years older than she, perhaps not so handsome as Lennie, but in every other way more suited to her. She had arranged this rendezvous with her new cavalier by an exchange of notes, and had selected Lucille to share her secret. She sensed that the red-haired girl really wanted to shift her affections back to the aggrandized Herbie, and therefore was likely to be discreet. This was a correct guess. The conversation in the canoe consisted of a hundred eloquent ways of expressing loathing for Lennie, and alternate praises of Herbie and the hulking Super-senior. The girls almost loved each other by the time the canoe grounded.

Buttoning on his shirt, Herbie ran to the canoe and took the hand that Lucille shyly extended to him. Yishy and Felicia were already strolling down the beach, holding hands and murmuring.

“Won't they catch you?” said Herbie. “You can't come to the boys' beach.”

“It's your sister's idea. What difference does it make now, anyway?”

Herbie remembered with a lifting of the heart that at this time tomorrow all the laws of Gauss would be as dead as the codes of Egypt.

“Well, I'm sure glad I was sittin' here.”

“So am I.”

He led Lucille to his favorite rock, and they sat side by side. His hand rested over hers. It felt cool and small. The sun was going down in immense splashes of red and gold over the whole sky.

“Herbie, I've been very bad to you.”

“Aw, it's O.K.”

“I like you a thousand times better'n Lennie.”