Hugh smiled and shook his head. “I’m afraid I don’t—yet. Beastly grind, I’d call it now. I say, isn’t it time for eats?”
CHAPTER VII
“HIS GRACE, THE DUKE”
Hugh Ordway was a success from the start. Everyone who met him found him interesting and attractive. They didn’t put it in just that way. Nick said: “His Grace, the Duke of Glyndestoke, is a little bit of all-right.” Pop Driver said, “A clever lad, that Ordway. Bring him over some evening, Bert.” Tom Hanrihan said, “Ordway’s got the stuff in him, Coach. He’ll bear watching. Doesn’t know a thing about football, but he’s a regular wonder at doing what he’s told to. Makes some of the others over there look like regular bone-heads.” Mr. Rumford, House Master at Lothrop Hall, confided to Mrs. Rumford at dinner one evening during the first week of school that “Ordway, in 29, is a most interesting boy, my dear. I wish you’d remember to have him in for dinner some Sunday. The fellow actually thinks for himself.”
Perhaps of equal importance, however, was Bert’s verdict, since, willy-nilly, the two boys were doomed to daily companionship. Bert’s verdict was delivered to himself three days after Hugh’s advent. “He’s a queer duffer, but I like him,” said Bert. What was doubtless equally fortunate was the fact that Bert’s liking was returned and perhaps with more enthusiasm. Hugh had felt rather strange, and, although he had tried not to show it, a little bit homesick at first, and Bert, more from a sense of duty than from affection at that stage, had taken him under his wing and done everything possible to make things easy for him. As Nick had remarked, entering school in the third year had its difficulties. Your classmates had formed their associations and your position was a good deal like that of a fifth hand at whist. You were not especially needed, and, while welcome enough to look on, there was no place for you at the table. But Bert’s efforts, coupled with Hugh’s personality, had succeeded, to continue the metaphor, in squeezing the newcomer up to the table. If at present Hugh was not actually taking part in the game, at least he was where he could enjoy seeing it. And for this Hugh was grateful.
As a matter of fact, he had come to Grafton with many misgivings. He had spent most of his sixteen years in England, only coming across to this country at long intervals and for brief stays. At such times his mother’s house on the East Shore in Maryland had been opened up for two or three months, infrequently for a longer period, and Hugh had lived a life not greatly different from his life in England. His father, a member of Parliament, and holding a position under the government, seldom accompanied them across. Within the last three years Hugh’s visits in the United States had occurred annually and had lasted longer, for his mother, whose idea it was to have Hugh educated in America, thought it well for him to know the country better than he did. Consequently, they had traveled a good deal last year and the year before, accompanied invariably by a tutor. That would not have been an American youth’s notion of ideal sight-seeing, but Hugh had been brought up with, first a governess, and, subsequently, a tutor at his elbow, and was thoroughly used to having them around. Nevertheless, when, last year, the Balliol College tutor had been left behind and a young, red-headed, and extremely energetic graduate of Yale had appeared at Shorefields and taken the boy in charge, Hugh had welcomed the change.
That fall and during part of the following winter Hugh had been coached for Grafton School. He had, for instance, a far more mature outlook but Mr. Fairway wouldn’t hear of it. Why waste a year, he asked, when, with a little harder work, he could enter the upper middle? Hugh, who had no great enthusiasm for the program in any case, agreed that to waste a year would be a criminal matter and set diligently to work unlearning not a little of what his English tutor had taught him. When, in January, they had returned to London he was pronounced ready for Grafton, his name was entered for admission the next September and he had contracted a certain amount of pleasurable anticipation, most of which, however, evaporated before he was once more headed across the ocean in August. By that time a realization of the fact that this New England preparatory school for which he was booked was quite dissimilar to any school of which he had knowledge, that the fellows he would meet there were different from him in manners and point of view, that, in short, he was taking a plunge into a strange pool filled with strange fishes, filled him with alarm. That he managed to conceal any sign of it was creditable. But he had found the school not so different, after all, from those he knew of, and the fellows were far less strange in their ways, views and speech than he had expected. Perhaps he did not actually give Bert the credit for bringing all this about, but he did somehow arrive at the conclusion that his roommate had worked something in the nature of a miracle in his behalf, and his gratitude, although not expressed in words, was deep and evident. Gratitude even when out of proportion to benefits bestowed is pleasant to the recipient, and doubtless the fact that Hugh was grateful and wanted Bert to know it had something to do with the latter’s liking for the younger boy.
That difference in age—it was in reality a matter of eight months—was not greatly apparent. In some ways Hugh seemed older than Bert. He had expected to enter the lower-middle class, on life and things in general. Bert sometimes felt annoyingly young and thoughtless during their discussions. Hugh had studied so many things out that Bert had never even considered, and studied them out, too, to a conclusion which, right or wrong, was at least something to tie to. Bert’s convictions were few and concerned matters close at hand. Hugh’s had to do with the most extraordinary things: American politics, the British foreign policy, income taxation, home rule for Ireland, back-court versus net play in tennis, woman suffrage, the abolition of the stymie in golf, fancy waistcoats, farming as a profession, and many, many more. Once Bert asked curiously if all English fellows bothered themselves with as many things as Hugh did and failed to get any information because Hugh forgot the question in trying to establish himself as only a half-Englishman. (“Fifty-fifty,” suggested Bert, which expression on being explained was seized on joyfully by Hugh and added to his rapidly increasing collection of slang phrases.)
Next to Bert, Hugh’s liking was given to Nick Blake, and then to Pop Driver, and after that, I suspect, to Guy Murtha. But Hugh had a fine capacity for liking everyone he met, finding, often to Bert’s amusement, qualities worthy of admiration in the fellows whom Bert had long since set down as utterly hopeless. Nick and Guy were daily visitors at Number 29, and many quite remarkable discussions took place up there under the roof, discussions usually conducted principally by Hugh and Guy, with Nick supplying a light comedy seasoning and Bert acting the rôle of audience and, generally, deciding the matter in the end. For, although frequently Bert found the argument too deep for him, he could sum up and award a verdict like a judge of the Supreme Court!
That study up there was a very attractive room now. Hugh had not brought a great deal with him in the way of pictures, but what he had brought were interesting and, as Nick said, gave tone. Bert’s wall decorations ran to “shingles” and framed posters, although he was the proud possessor of a good etching of sheep by Monks, and a rather jolly coaching print. Then there was a six-foot silk banner of vivid scarlet, with the word “Grafton” in gray letters, along one wall, and a captured Mount Morris pennant, green and white, and showing battle marks, over the window-seat. The pillows were the usual strange collections of all hues and styles, many of them, of course, running to scarlet-and-gray. Hugh’s contributions were photographs, some quite large and all handsomely framed. The one that produced the most interest on the part of visitors was the picture of his home in England. It was just like the baronial manors and lordly castles you read about, Nick declared, and when he got enormously rich he was going to buy one just like it. It was a stone building, with the stones set in a peculiarly haphazard fashion, and it rambled over the best part of an acre, or seemed to. There were turrets and battlements, and much very orderly ivy, and the remains of a moat, and many stately trees and a “front yard,” as Nick called it, that looked like two or three perfectly level golf links thrown into one! That photograph was a never-ceasing source of joy to Nick, and if he was there when a new visitor arrived he always haled the latter up to see it.