Play the Game! Part 4

"I have," said her stepfather. "I've got the words here and I'm messing about for some music to go with them."

Honor looked out as she pa.s.sed the window on her way to the piano. "Wait a minute! Here's Jimsy! I'll call him!" She sped to the door and hailed him, and he came swiftly in. "h.e.l.lo! How was practice?"

"Fair. Burke was better. Tried him on the end. 'Lo, Mr. Lorimer. 'Lo, Carter!"

"I've got a poem here you'll all like," said Stephen Lorimer. "No, you needn't shuffle your feet, Jimsy. It's your kind. Sit down, all of you.

I'll read it."

"So long as it hasn't got any 'whate'ers' and yestereves' and 'beauteous,'" the last King grinned. "Shoot!"

"It's an English thing, by Henry Newbolt,--about cricket, but that doesn't matter. It's the thing itself. I may not have the words exactly,--I read it over there, and copied it down in my diary, from memory." He looked at the boys and the girl; Honor was waiting eagerly, sure of anything he might bring her; Jimsy King, fresh from the sweating realities of the gridiron, was good-humoredly tolerant; Carter Van Meter was courteously attentive, with his oddly mature air of social poise. He began to read, to recite, rather, his eyes on their faces:

There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night, Ten to make and the match to win; A b.u.mping pitch and a blinding light, An hour to play and the last man in, And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat Or the selfish hope of a season's fame, But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote-- Play up! Play up! and--Play the Game!

Jimsy King, who was lolling on the couch, sat up, his eyes kindling.

"Gee...." he breathed. Honor's cheeks were scarlet and she was breathing hard and fast. Only the new boy was unmoved, his pale face still pale, his shadowed eyes calm. Stephen Lorimer kept that picture of them always in his heart; it was, he came to think, symbol and prophecy. He swung into the second verse, his voice warming:

The sand of the desert is sodden red; Red with the wreck of a square that broke; The gatling's jammed and the colonel dead, And the regiment blind with dust and smoke: The River of Death has brimmed his banks; And England's far, and Honor a name, But the voice of a school boy rallies the ranks-- Play up! Play up! and--Play the Game!

His own voice shook a little on the last line and he was a trifle amused at his emotionalism. He tried to bring the moment sanely back to the commonplace. "Corking for a song, Top Step. I'll hammer out some chords ... doesn't need much." He looked again through the strangely charged atmosphere of the quiet room, at the three big children. Jimsy King was on his feet, shaken out of the serene insolence of his young stoicism, his hands opening and shutting, swallowing hard, and Honor, the boy-girl, Jimsy's st.u.r.dy Skipper, was crying, frankly, unashamed, unaware, the tears welling up out of her wide eyes, rolling down her bright cheeks. Only Carter Van Meter sat as before, a little withdrawn, a little aloof, in the shadow.

CHAPTER IV

When they told Marcia Van Meter (Mrs. Horace Flack) that her little boy would always be lame, that not one of the great surgeon-wizards on either side of the Atlantic--not all the king's horses and all the king's men could ever weight or wrench or force the small, thin left leg down to the length of the right, she vowed to herself that she would make it up to him. She was a pretty thing, transparently frail and ethereal-looking, who had always projected herself pa.s.sionately into the lives of those about her--her father's and mother's--the young husband's who had died soon after her son was born--and now her boy's. While he was less than ten years old it seemed to her that she compa.s.sed it; if he could not race and run with his contemporaries he rode the smartest of ponies and drove clever little traps; if he might not join in the rough sports out of doors he had a houseful of brilliant mechanical toys; he lived like a little Prince--like a little American Prince with a magic bottomless purse at his command. But when he left his little boyhood behind she discovered her futility; she discovered the small, pitiful purchasing power of money, after all. She could not buy him bodily strength and beauty; she could not buy him fellowship in the world of boys; he was forever looking out at it, wistfully, disdainfully, bitterly, through his plate gla.s.s window.

She spent herself untiringly for him,--playmates, gifts, tutors, journeys. Her happiest moments were those in which he said, "Mother, I'd like one of those wireless jiggers,"--or a new saddle-horse, or a new roadster--and she was able to answer, "Dearest, I'll get it for you!

Mother'll get it for you to-morrow!"

But the days when she could spell omnipotence for him were fading away.

He wanted now, increasingly, things beyond her gift. He was a clever boy, proud, poised. He learned early to wear a mask of indifference about his lameness, to affect a coolness for sports which came, eventually, to be genuine. He studied easily and well; he could talk with a brilliancy beyond his years. He learned--astonishingly, at his age--to get his deepest satisfactions from creature comforts--his quietly elegant clothes, his food, his surroundings. Mrs. Van Meter had high hopes of the move to Los Angeles; he was to be benefited, body and brain. She was a little anxious at finding they had moved into a neighborhood of boys and girls; Carter was happier with older people, but he seemed to like these lively, robust creatures surprisingly.

Weeks, months, a year, went by. Carter, less than a year older than Jimsy King but two years ahead of him in his studies, was doing some special work at the University of Southern California, but his time was practically his own--to spend with Honor and Jimsy. Honor and Jimsy showed, each of them, the imprint of their a.s.sociation with him. They had come to care more for the things he held high ... books ... theaters ... dinners at the Crafts Alexandria ... Grand Opera records on the victrola ... more careful dress.

"Carter has really done a great deal for those children," Mildred Lorimer told her husband, complacently.

"Yes," Stephen admitted. "It's true. He has. And"--he sighed--"they haven't done a thing for him."

"Stephen dear,--what could they do--crude children that they are, beside a boy with his advantages? What could they do for him?--Make him play football? What did you expect them to do?"

"I don't know," he said, moodily, "but at any rate they haven't done it."

Jimsy King was going--by the grace of his own frantic eleventh hour efforts and his teachers' clemency and Honor Carmody--to graduate.

Barring calamities, he would possess a diploma in February. Honor was tremendously earnest about it; Carter, to whom learning came as easily as the air he breathed, faintly amused. She thought, sometimes, for brief, traitorous moments, that Carter wasn't always good for Jimsy.

"You see," she explained to her stepfather, "Carter doesn't realize how hard Jimsy has to grind for all he gets. Even now, Stepper, after being here a year, he actually doesn't realize the importance of Jimsy's getting signed up to play. It's a strange thing, with all his cleverness, but he doesn't, and he's always taking Jimsy out on parties and rides and things, and he gets behind in everything. I think I'll just have to speak to him about it."

He nodded. "That's a good idea, Top Step. Do that."

She grew still more sober. "Another thing, Stepper ... about--about Mr.

King's--trouble. Of course, you and I have never believed that Jimsy _had_ to inherit it, have we?"

"No. Not if people let him alone. His life, his training, his environment, are very different--more wholesome, vital. The energy which his grandfather and his uncles and his father had to find a vent for in cards and drink Jimsy's sweated out in athletics."

"Yes. But--just the same--isn't it better for Jimsy to keep away from--from those things?"

"Naturally. Better for anybody."

She sighed. "Carter doesn't think so. He says the world is full of it--Jimsy must learn to be near it and let it alone."

"That's true, in a sense, T. S...."

"I know. But--sometimes I think Carter deliberately takes Jimsy places to--test him. Of course he thinks he's doing right, but it worries me."

Stephen Lorimer smoked in silence. He had his own ideas. "Better have that talk with him," he said.

Honor found the talk oddly disturbing. Carter was very sweet about it as he always was with her, but he held stubbornly to his own opinion.

"Look here, Honor, you can't follow Jimsy through the world like a nursemaid, you know."

"Carter! I don't mean----"

"He's got to meet and face these things, to fight what somebody calls 'the battle of his blood.' You mustn't wrap him up in cotton wool. If he's going, to be bowled over he might as well find it out. He must take his chances--just as any other fellow--just as I must."

"Oh, but, Carter, you know you're strong, and----"

Suddenly his pale face was stung with hot color. "Honor," he leaned forward, "you think I'm strong, in _any_ way? You don't consider me an--utter weakling?"

She looked with comprehending tenderness at his crimson face. "Why, Carter, dear! You know I've never thought you that! There are more ways of being--being strong than--than just with muscles and bones!"

He reached out and took one of her firm, tanned hands in his, and she had never seen him so winningly wistful, so wistfully winning. "I thought," he said, very low, "that was the only kind of strength that counted with you. Then--I do count with you, Honor? I do?"

She was a little startled, a little frightened, wholly uncomfortable.

There was something in Carter's voice she didn't understand ... something she didn't want to understand. She pulled her hand away and managed her boyish grin. "Of course you do,--goose! And you'll count more if you'll help me to look after Jimsy and have him graduate on time!" She got up quickly as her stepfather came into the room, and Carter went home, crossing the street with the rather pathetic arrogance of his halting gait, his head held high, tilted a little back, which gave him the expression of looking down on a world of swift striders.

He found his mother reading before a low fire. "Well, dearest?" She smiled up at him, yearningly.

He stood looking down at her, his face working. "Mother, I want Honor Carmody."

"Carter!"

"I want Honor Carmody." He rode over her murmured protests. "I know I'm only nineteen. I know I'm too young--she's too young. I'd expect to wait, of course. But--_I want her_."