Rough-Hewn

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

This seemed to be final. He looked back at his newspaper. But after a while, as though something had occurred to him he asked, "Who's teaching you? Where do you play?"

"I ran across Don Roberts, over in Nutley. They used to live here, on Central Avenue. He used to go to Number Two School." He wanted to go on and tell about Don's being in Princeton, but could not propel himself past the full-stop, where an inadvertent cadence of his voice had dropped him.

Next morning he found Don with a whitewash brush touching up the marking of the court. For three hours they practised—a most exhausting three hours! He thought he began to make a little progress. He knew he was almost all in, when noon came, worn out far more by the mental strain of struggling his way into a new technique, than by the physical effort, although that had been enough to leave him blown and panting, as they went into the house to have lunch.

The two boys were alone at the table. Don swaggered a little as he served his guest. "No one at home," he explained. "Mother and the girls are down at Asbury. The old man doesn't get back from the office till the 5.45. I can hear his train whistle from here. He finds his loving son deep in his books, you bet."

Through luncheon Don fired Neale's enthusiasm with stories of Big Bill Edwards, Arthur Poe, Lady Jayne and other heroes of his Alma Mater. Afterwards he strolled to the living-room, sat down at the piano, and sang "The Orange and the Black,"—"There's a college we call Princeton." Then lowering his voice, with many nods and knowing winks, he sang a long song with the refrain, "Keep your eye on tricky little Sarah."

Neale's play on the streets and in vacant lots with perfectly heterogeneous and casual little boys had given him quite enough of a vocabulary to understand the words of this song; and odds and ends of the older boys' talk overheard in the locker-room at Hadley made the spirit of it by no means unfamiliar. But this was the first time that either words or spirit had ever been more than one of the casual by-products of boy-life. What put it in the center of his attention now was his admiration of Don as the model of colorful, sophisticated life. Evidently this was a part of such life. Neale applied his mind therefore to the words and the spirit and learned to hum the air.

That evening Father read another uneventful letter from Mother; then they sat in silence till, as father was filling his pipe, he remarked, as if it had just come into his mind, "Oh, I thought you ought to have a racket of your own, Neale. I got one. It's in the hall on the coat-rack."

Neale bounded upstairs and carried his prize to his room. There was not only a Sears racket, but three Wright and Ditson balls, Spalding's "Tennis Guide," and a little pamphlet on "How to Play Lawn Tennis." Neale dropped into his Morris chair and devoured both books before going to bed.

The hard protective husk of his little boyhood was so newly sloughed off, that his adolescence had as yet received scarcely a mark upon its new freshness to impression. Ready now, responsive with an inward quiver to a whole range of experience to which he had been blind and deaf before, he was catching up from the chance materials about him, the stuff with which to construct his new world. And here was material ready to his hand. The editor, an enthusiast, an idealist of sportsmanship had put a great deal in his little treatise beside his copious advice as to the proper grip on the racket and the laying out of a court. Without the slightest self-consciousness (because he had the not-to-be-imitated single-heartedness of the sincere devotee) he had charged every section of his treatise with the spirit of the game, the spirit of sport, not of border warfare. So matter-of-factly was this message conveyed that even the adolescent soul, half-crusader, half-Hun, did not guess that it was being preached to. The word "honor" was never mentioned, yet Neale understood perfectly the significance of what he read, under the caption "Tournaments:" "The committee should provide adequate linesmen, for while the contestants themselves can generally tell whether a ball is good or not, yet close decisions occur in every match and it is obviously unfair to force a player to penalize himself (as he naturally would feel bound to do) by giving his opponent the benefit of the doubt on all uncertain cases." He nodded approvingly over the phrase, "as he naturally would feel bound to do." It did not strike him as a new idea, but merely a clearer statement of something he had always felt was in the air about sports. Yes, that was how a college man would act, how Don would act.

Again, among the illustrations he was struck by a photograph of the winner and runner-up shaking hands after the Newport tournament. Neale looked long at the expression of cordial congratulation and admiration on the loser's face. He moved uneasily in his chair at the recollection of a nine of disgruntled urchins muttering after a defeat, "Aw, you bunch of stiffs, wait till we get you on our own diamond." Neale had been one of those who muttered, one of those so stung by defeat that the idea of admiring the better playing which had beaten them would have been inconceivable to him. Neale knew himself well enough to know the fierceness of his lust for victory. He knew it was going to be a job to tame that lust to this civilized code. But he would try. Morally on tip-toe, he resolved to be worthy of Don's friendship.