[CHAPTER XVIII]
“OLD EARNEST”
Humphrey was “breaking into Society,” to use his own half-contemptuous phrase. That is to say, he had made two visits with Ira, had renewed acquaintances with Fred Lyons and Gene Goodloe and Mart Johnston and Dwight Bradford, and had shaken hands with perhaps a half-dozen others. He pretended to make fun of the proceedings, but was secretly very pleased. He was received politely by new acquaintances, more on Ira’s account than his own, for Ira had become a person of prominence now, and with a fair degree of cordiality by those he had met before. He had sense enough to show his best side, and behaved quietly and even modestly and let the others do most of the talking. Perhaps his best side was his real side. At any rate, Ira began to hope so then, and later in the year he became convinced of it. Humphrey didn’t give up his friends at the Central Billiard Palace all at once, but he did confine his visits to that place to two or three evenings a week. And Ira heard a great deal less of “Billy” and “Jimmy” and the rest of the billiard-hall crowd.
Meanwhile, Ira had taken possession of Humphrey’s November allowance and Humphrey was having it doled out to him three dollars at a time. The first week he ran through his three dollars by Wednesday and Ira had to advance two more. But the next week Humphrey got along with the three, and after that he seldom had to ask for more. Boarding at Mrs. Trainor’s was the real solution of his financial problem; that and wasting less money on pool. Later in the year he became thoroughly interested in economising and eventually opened a banking account of his own. But that doesn’t belong in the present narrative.
With the end of the football season only about a fortnight away, Parkinson School became rampantly patriotic, and no one could have sanely found fault with its attitude toward the team. It was now as enthusiastically supporting the eleven as even Fred Lyons could wish. There were cheer meetings about every other night and the one principal subject of conversation whenever two or more fellows met was: “Will We Beat ’Em?” “’Em,” of course, were the Kenwood team, for no one particularly cared what happened to Day and Robins’ or St. Luke’s. Fortunately for discussion, there were plenty who believed or pretended to believe that Kenwood would repeat her last year’s performance and tie another defeat to Parkinson. Those who held that view had excellent grounds for their conviction, for Kenwood had passed, or, more correctly, was passing through a very successful season. So far the Blue had met with but one defeat, had seven victories to her credit and had played a 0 to 0 game with the State College Second Team. In fact, Kenwood had one of her Big Teams this season, if Kenwood was to be believed, and was pretty confident of a victory over the Brown. The Kenwood school paper caused a spasm of indignation throughout Parkinson by editorially calling on the Football Association to move the Parkinson game up the next Fall so that the blue team might meet in her final contest a foeman more worthy of her steel. The Leader replied scathingly to that impertinent reflection on the Parkinson team and printed a page of letters to the editor from “Patriot,” “Veritas,” “Indignant” and other well-known scribes.
Theoretically at least, Ira had no time for interests or adventures outside football, for he was an extremely busy, hard-worked youth from the Monday succeeding the Chancellor game to the Thursday before the contest with Kenwood Academy. Nor, for that matter, did any other interests win his attention or other adventures befall him, if we except, in the first case, study—he had to do more or less of that—and, in the second case, a call from “Old Earnest.”
Ernest Hicks would probably have been much surprised if anyone had connected him in any way with an adventure, for adventures didn’t lay within his scheme of life. But at a period when Ira’s days were made up of hearing, thinking and playing football, anything not connected with that all-absorbing subject possessed for him the attributes of an adventure. It was on a Friday afternoon, the Friday preceding the Day and Robins’s game, between his last recitation and the practice hour, that someone knocked on his half-closed door. He had heard footsteps on the stairs, but usually such footsteps went on to one of the other doors and he hadn’t looked up from the book he was studying. He said “Come in!” and rather expected to be confronted by the freckle-faced youth who called for and, in the course of time, brought back the laundry. But when the door opened it was “Old Earnest” who stood there, and Ira wonderingly slipped a pencil between the pages and arose.
“Have you got an encyclopedia?” inquired the visitor, his gaze, from behind the big, round lenses of his spectacles, roaming inquiringly about the room.
“No, I haven’t,” answered Ira. “At least, only a small, one-volume one. I’m afraid it wouldn’t be of much use to you. I usually go over to the library.”
The visitor nodded. “Yes, you can do that.” He rubbed his chin reflectively with long, thin fingers and observed Ira dubiously. He was quite the tallest youth Ira had ever seen, and he was as thin and angular as he was tall. He had brown hair, which was worn rather too long and which looked sadly in need of brushing, grey eyes, a very sharp nose, a wide, thin mouth and a chin that came almost to a point. He looked to Ira as if he needed a square meal, or, rather, a whole series of square meals, for his face was as narrow as his body and his queer, nondescript clothes hung about him as though they had been fashioned at some far-distant time when he had weighed about three times his present weight. His coat was a plaid lounging jacket from which depended by a few threads one remaining frog. The corresponding button had followed its companions into oblivion. His trousers were of grey flannel and his feet were encased in a pair of brown canvas “sneakers.” Ira had glimpsed him frequently about the corridors of Parkinson Hall, but this present costume was not what he wore at recitations, which, as Ira reflected, was a fortunate thing for the sobriety of the classrooms!