IN THE LINE
CHAPTER I
RAW MATERIAL
Wolcott Lindsay Senior, with Wolcott Lindsay Junior, and Wolcott Junior’s Mamma, arrived in Boston on New Year’s day, after buffeting for sixty hours against a furious northwest storm that left the great ice-coated liner looking like a glass ship taken from a globe on the nursery shelf and magnified a thousand times. Wolcott Junior, being a healthy, vigorous youth, with thousands of footpounds of energy running hourly to waste, and having the overweening confidence in his own powers which distinguishes some otherwise very attractive specimens of American boyhood, had found the restraint of the cabin extremely irksome. Had the voyage lasted much longer, he must have discovered some means of getting by the barriers which kept him in safe imprisonment. In that case there might have been no Wolcott Lindsay Junior, and no story of “In the Line” to be written.
“Junior,” as his mother called him, was not one to slip by a sentinel unobserved. Five feet eleven in height, unshod; one hundred seventy-five pounds in weight, unclothed; with heart and lungs unstrained by growth, and muscles already swelling in significant bunches and bands, he looked more like a college junior than a raw boy not yet eighteen, still unripe for entrance examinations.
“Ridiculous,” his father had said, lifting his eyes from their five-foot-six-inch level and measuring the whole length and breadth of his offspring,—“perfectly ridiculous to be so big! Why, if you keep on at this rate you’ll be as much out of place in an average house as a rhinoceros in a garret. And not yet even a sub-freshman!”
“Now, Wolcott!” expostulated Mrs. Lindsay, “you know that’s not fair. If you had told us we were going to stay in Hamburg two years instead of six months, we should have put him in a good school or had a tutor for him. It isn’t his fault if he’s behind; he hasn’t had a fair chance.”
At this the expression on the face of Lindsay père changed. “He shall have chance enough when we get home. No more conversation lessons in French and German, or reading novels for vocabulary, or going to the theatre for pronunciation, or rowing on the Elster with that learned fool, Herr Doktor Krauss; but old-fashioned Latin and Greek and mathematics in some good, stiff school, under a clear-headed American teacher. Too bad that the boy couldn’t have had a touch of the Hamburger Gymnasium!”
At this suggestion that hard things were in store for the young man, Mrs. Lindsay looked worried, and Junior assumed an air of indifference that cloaked his real feeling, which was one of joy to be coming home again to boys of his own race and kind, and of willingness to put up with any school or any work, however “stiff,” so long as it was American and with Americans.