On the Stairs | Page 5

or four small rooms they occupied); nor did I much concern myself as to whither they might have gone. Probably opportunity had opened up a more promising path. However, the path did not lead far; for Johnny, a month or two later, made his first appearance at the Academy, on the opening of the fall term. During the preceding year he had been going to a public school "across the tracks" and had played with a boisterous crowd in a big cindered yard.
Therefore, when Raymond, surrounded by half a dozen other boys, took occasion, on the stairs, to say:--
"How are you, Johnny?"--
And Johnny, with his back to the wall of the landing, replied:--
"I'm pretty well,"--
Johnny may have meant that, despite the novelty and the strangeness of his situation, he was very well, indeed; feeling, doubtless, that he was finally where he had a right to be and that his alert face was turned the proper way.
The boys about Raymond were asking him to take part in a football game. It was not that Raymond was especially popular; but he could run. In that simple day football was football--principally a matter of running and of straightforward kicking; and Raymond could do both better than any other boy in the school. He could also outjump any of us--when he would take the trouble to try. In fact, his physical faculties were in his legs; his arms were nowhere. He was never able to throw either far or straight. Some of his early attempts at throwing were met with shouts of ridicule, and he never tried the thing further. If he fell upon the ill luck of finding a ball in his hands, he would toss it to somebody else with an air of facetious negligence. To stand, as Johnny McComas could stand, and throw a ball straight up for seventy-five feet and then catch it without stirring a foot from the spot where he was planted, would have been an utter impossibility for him. In fact, Raymond simply cultivated his obviously natural gifts; he never exerted himself systematically to make good any of his deficiencies. He was so as a boy; and he remained so always.
In those early days we had no special playgrounds. We commonly used the streets. There was little traffic. Pedestrians took their chances on the sidewalks with leapfrog and the like, and we took ours, in turn, in the wide roadway with "pom-pom-peel-away" and similar games. Football, however, would take us to a vacant corner lot, some two streets away. Some absentee owner in the East was doubtless paying taxes on it with hopes of finally recouping himself through the unearned increment. Meanwhile it ran somewhat to rubbish and tin cans, to bare spots from which adjoining homemakers had removed irregular squares of turf, and to holes in the dry, brown earth where potatoes had been baked with a minimum of success and a maximum of wood ashes and acrid smoke. It was on the way to this frequented tract that Raymond carelessly let fall a word about Johnny McComas. Perhaps he need not have said that Johnny had lately been living above his father's stable--but he spoke without special animus. A few of the boys thought Johnny's intrusion odd, even cheeky; but most of them, employing the social assimilability of youth,--especially that of youth in the Middle West,--laid little stress upon it. Johnny made his place, in due time and on his own merits. Or shall I say, rather, by his own powers?
V
You are not to suppose that while I was free to visit Johnny in the stable, I was not free to visit Raymond in the house. Though my people lived rather modestly on a side street, the interior of the Prince residence was not unknown to me. On one occasion Raymond took me up to his room so that I might hear some of his writings. He had been to Milwaukee or to Indianapolis, and had found himself moved to set down an account of his three days away from home. He led me through several big rooms downstairs before we got to his own particular quarters above. The furnishing of these rooms impressed me at the time; but I know, now, that they were heavy and clumsy when they were meant to be rich and massive, and were meretricious when they were meant to be elegant. It was all of the Second Empire, qualified by an erratic, exaggerated touch that was natively American. I am afraid I found it rather superb and was made uncomfortable--was even intimidated by it; all the more so that Raymond took it completely for granted. One room contained a big orchestrion with many pipes in tiers, like an organ's. On one occasion I heard it play the overture to