On Neale's thirteenth birthday, his mother gave him a little silver watch and his father, a bicycle. In addition to the excitement of getting into his teens and of owning these visible and outward symbols of advancement, he was told that he would now be sent to a real school, with no girls in the classes, where he would really learn something; that is to say where he would be prepared for college.
Hadley Prep. was an excellent school, a sort of model school, an information factory. You fed a small boy into it and at the end of four years the school turned him out completely filled with classified information. Boys entered with all sorts of hazy disorders of learning; they were ground out, possessed of a chain of facts, every link shining, polished and joined by flawless welding to the preceding and consequent facts. The curriculum took no count of modern educational fads; "spiritual awakening, character building, intellectual growth" had no place there. What would you have? Four years is a short enough time to prepare boys for their college entrance examinations. The non-essentials had to be cut out. The great point was that when the Principal signed a certificate of graduation he knew that the boy in question could produce any piece of information required of him, from the preterit of recevoir to the formula for accelerated motion of falling bodies, at any college entrance examination in the United States.
Into the hopper of this mental polishing-machine, Neale was poured with fifty other little boys and began painfully to adapt himself to its rigorous codes. It was a process trying to the most robust among them, and devastating to the weaker ones. The devastating quality was not only recognized and admitted but sedulously fostered by the faculty and Principal. It was part of their business to see that the weaklings fell by the wayside long before the flock was led up to the narrow gate of the college entrance examinations. And as some hospitals achieve a miraculously low death-rate by the simple process of never admitting a patient whom they are not sure they can cure, so Hadley Prep. achieved the miraculously low rate of examination mortality for which it was famous the country over, by the simple process of knocking on the head and throwing out on the scrap-heap any boy whose brains seemed reluctant to admit college-entrance examination facts.
Those whose heads were hard enough to resist the knocking, found themselves completely absorbed by the mental gymnastics which filled their days. The first two years of his life at Hadley Prep. had almost nothing in them for Neale except his over-time struggle to make up for the omissions of Miss Vanderwater's haphazard tuition. Everything else, even the assuming of long trousers, even the summers in the country, even games, were banished to the fringe of consciousness, like things seen out of the corner of your eye while you are gazing with all your might at something else. The life of his personality, his inner self, during those two years, realized the ideal of the eighteenth century educator who felt that the only safe up-bringing for boys would be to shut them up in a barrel, between the ages of twelve and eighteen, and feed them through the bung-hole. The record of what was fed through the Hadley bung-hole was set down on Neale's report cards, which he dutifully brought home to his parents. They glanced up from their absorption in each other, read, and smiled over the mathematical accuracy of the Hadley information about the state of Neale's mind (the Hadley professor often marked a boy as 87.75 proficient in American history, or 90.3 learned in German). At times they wondered if Hadley were the best place for him. But they were exactly like all other parents: they really had no idea what else to do with Neale. His health continued good and he did not seem rebellious, so they confined their supervision of his education to paying his rather expensive tuition, signing his report cards, and handing them back to him.
Towards the end of the second year Neale began to master the new technique. He memorized the magic pass-words which are accepted as a proof of understanding many subjects. He began to draw breath, to tread water less frantically and still not to fear the closing over his head of smothering floods. The third year he felt earth beneath his feet again, and relaxed enough from his mental concentration to spend occasionally an hour or two on the school athletic field. He was fifteen years old now, wore long trousers and suits with vests, a stand-up collar, ties he tied himself, and carried a fountain pen. Underneath all this grown-up bravery of exterior, there was a brain that had learned to acquire and pigeon-hole information, and a perfectly dormant personality.
Life at the Crittenden home was, as far as he was concerned, exactly the same life he had always known, except that instead of playing on the streets, he went out on the school athletic-field, and instead of playing with his tin soldiers, he usually went up to his room to grind over his lessons. At breakfast and supper his father and mother talked peaceably to one another just as they always had, and although Neale was able now to understand the subjects of their chat, their talk was, as a matter of fact, often quite as incomprehensible to him as it had been when he was a small boy. They had grown so much together, had so shared life with each other and no one else, that they possessed almost a language of their own, made up of references, only half-expressed, to things they had said long ago, or to experiences they had had together, or to opinions they both knew so well there was no need to formulate them in words. Neale was not surprised at this, nor yet resentful. On his side he was absorbed in his studies and the life at school. It was true that every once in a while they talked directly to Neale; asked him questions—what studies he liked best—how the teachers treated him—what he had to eat at lunch. Whatever they asked Neale always tried to answer in accordance with the facts; that he was getting along all right he guessed, that everything was satisfactory as far as he could see, that he hadn't any idea what he should like to do later on to earn his living.
Occasionally, instead of taking the trolley cars, Father and Neale walked together down the long steps to Hoboken and along 6th Street to Hudson, where his father turned south and Neale went to the school. Then talk was harder to dodge—not that Neale ever consciously dodged. They would walk a dozen blocks. Father would ask a question, Neale would answer it. Another dozen blocks, and another question. Once Father asked if Neale wasn't sticking indoors too much. Couldn't he manage to get a little more exercise? Neale explained the seriousness of his studies and pointed out that he still rode his wheel on Saturdays. But the suggestion took root. Neale bought a pair of Indian clubs and an instruction book, and took to swinging the clubs fifteen minutes night and morning with the windows open.
Another time Father said, "Look here, Neale, haven't you any friends?"
Neale was astonished, "Why, yes, I'm friends with the whole class."
"Yes, I suppose so, but you never seem to be with them outside of school. When I went to school we were always playing around in each other's yards and barns."