On the Stairs | Page 5

times in all. I never speculated--never asked where they had come from;
never considered the nature of their tenure (not wondering how much
Johnny's father may have been paid for driving the two bays and
washing the parlor and bedroom windows and milking the cow, when
there was one, and not figuring the reduction in wages due to the
renting value of the three 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