At every opportunity he joined the group on the steps. No one addressed him. If he spoke no one answered. At table the Coffee-colored Angel no longer asked him to pass his plate, but passed it around the other way. He went out in the evenings and placed his cap in line with the other boys', but the ball never went into his hat. If he stood, hoping to be hit, no one seemed to notice that he was standing there. For several days he sought to brazen it out with a miserable, sinking feeling, and then he gave it up. He had thought he cared nothing for the company of his House mates—he soon discovered his error and recognized his offending. But apology was now out of the question. He was a pariah, a leper, and so must continue—a thing to be shunned.
The awful loneliness of his punishment threw him on his own resources. At night he lay in his bed and heard Butsey steal out to a midnight spread behind closed doors, or to join a band that, risking the sudden creak of a treacherous step, went down the stairs and out to wend their way with other sweltering bands across the moonlit ways, through negro settlements, where frantic dogs bayed at the sticks they rattled over the picket fences, to the banks of the canal for a cooling frolic in the none too fragrant waters.
In the morning he could not join the group that congregated to listen to Beekstein—Secretary of Education—straighten out the involved syntax or track an elusive x to its secret lair. In the afternoon he could not practice on the diamond with them, learning the trick of holding elusive flies or teaching himself to face thunderous outshoots at the plate.
This enforced seclusion had one good result: left to his own devices his recitations improved tremendously, though this was scant consolation.
He kept his own company proudly, reading long hours into the land of Dumas and Victor Hugo; straying up to the 'Varsity diamond, where he cast himself forlornly on the grass, apart from the groups, to watch Charlie DeSoto dash around the bases, and wonderful Jo Brown on third base scrape up the grounders and shoot them to first.
He was too proud to seek other friends, for that meant confession. Besides, his own classmates were all busy on their own diamonds, working for the success of their own House nines.
Only when there was a 'Varsity game and he was swallowed up in the indiscriminate mass that whooped and cheered back of first, thrilling at a sudden crisis, did he forget himself a little and feel a part of the great system. Once when, in a game with the Princeton Freshmen, Jo Brown cleared the bases with a sizzling three-bagger, a fourth-former he didn't know thumped him ecstatically on the back and he thrilled with gratitude.
But the rest was loneliness, ever recurrent loneliness, day in and day out. His only friends were Charlie DeSoto and Butcher Stevens at first, whom he could watch and understand—feeling, also, the fierce spirit of battle cooped up and forbidden within him.
One night in the second week of June, when Butsey White had gone to a festal spread in Cheyenne Baxter's rooms, Dink sat cheerlessly over the Latin page, seeing neither gerund nor gerundive.
The windows were open to the multiplied chorus of distant frogs and the drone of near-by insects. The lamp was hot, his clothes steamed on his back. He thought of the rootbeer and sarsaparilla being consumed down the hall and, going to the closet, consulted his own store of comforting things.