A lonely child was Tony, gentle and biddable enough, quick at his books, and happiest in his school hours, when people let him alone, and he succeeded in pleasing the clever, testy schoolmaster, whose life was embittered by a constant struggle with an overwhelming desire to whack the young demons who tormented him. He had been “summonsed” twice by irate parents; so now he restrained himself at the expense of his teaching powers and his nerves generally.
Tony stopped in the middle of the road and smacked his pocket.
“I’ll go to the baths to-morrow morning,” he said aloud, “and see them young nobs swim; it’s only threepence before nine.”
A great excitement—unshared, unmentioned—had lately come into Tony’s life. Every morning for the last week, about eight o’clock he had watched for two boys who went by on bicycles with towels strapped on to their handle-bars. One was quite a little boy, far less than Tony himself; the other bigger, and in his eyes less interesting; and in a few minutes after them came one for whom Tony had conceived the extravagant, unreasoning admiration children will sometimes lavish on somebody with whom they have never exchanged, or hope to exchange, two words; someone unconscious of their existence as they are the richer for that other’s.
Everybody in Tony’s locality knew the recruiting sergeant by sight: “Sergeant” who taught drill and gymnastics to all the “young gen’lemen” in the neighborhood. But Tony adored him, not only because he was so tall and good looking—and Tony was strenuously certain that it is a goodly thing to be upstanding and to have broad shoulders, instead of the champagne-bottle variety carried by his brothers and their like—but because he knew that the sergeant wished him well; inasmuch as that he, even he also, was one of the hundred and fifty odd boys in the parish schools of St. James’s. For now that the war fever was somewhat abating, now that Sergeant himself had come back from the front that he might send more soldiers out there, he had offered to drill the boys in St. James’s schools twice a week for love. And it could not be arranged.
The authorities, while granting the utility of algebra and French to those in the seventh standard, who were presently to form the bulk and bulwark of the nation, saw no good reason why an attempt should be made to give them straight backs and broad chests. So Sergeant, who loved his country, and was, in his way, something of a philanthropist, sighed and swore, and “put the question by.”
But Tony, who had heard the subject canvassed, and listened to the lamentations of the boys, was filled with a passion of gratitude, which found no expression save in a constant hanging round corners to see his idol pass.
Tony sat on his bed naked, in a patch of moonlight, admiring his own legs.
“My body be whiter nor theirn,” he said to himself, and indeed, his limbs looked radiantly fair in the mellow light. “But my arms beant so ’ard as ’is’n for all ’e be such little chap,” he continued, pinching the soft flesh of the upper arm in a dissatisfied way.