The hunter’s meal to share.”
You would bask the more unrestrictedly in Harry’s presence did you not see in him your unlucky self; and while he is speaking you feverishly go over and over parts of your own piece.
As Harry approaches the end, his pace grows faster and faster, until at a gallop he dashes through the concluding stanza, offers a second bob in lieu of other punctuation, long lacking, and clumps back to his seat, where he grins rapturously, as if he had at last had a tooth pulled.
“NINA GOTTLOB.
COMPOSITION:‘KINDNESS’”
How you envy Harry’s light-heartedness as with bated breath you strain your ears for the next announcement!
This proves to be “Nina Gottlob. Composition: ‘Kindness.’” After Nina somebody else, not you, is summoned; and thus name after name is read, with you hanging on by your very eyebrows, before, at the most unexpected moment, come to you, like the crack o’ doom, the words: “Johnny Walker. Recitation: ‘The Soldier of the Rhine.’”
The teacher looks at you expectantly. Snoopie trips you as you tower into the aisle. Oh, the tremendous distance which you, all feet and arms, traverse in getting to the platform! You mount; and here you stand, a giant, and bow. Away below, and stretching into space remote, are faces of friends and enemies—the ones (mostly those of little girls) gravely staring at you, and the others twisted into hideous grimaces calculated to make you laugh. As in a dream you witness your mother gazing up at you with beaming, prideful, but withal anxious eye.
Very vacant-headed, you drag from your throat a thin stranger voice which says:
“A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers;