The play that won

by Ralph Henry Barbour

Daniel Webster Jones, Jr., had solemnly pronounced anathema, malediction and imprecation upon Talbot Cummings. He had put his whole heart and soul into it and concentrated until his head felt funny. That had been yesterday afternoon, just after dinner, and now, more than twenty-four hours later, there was Cummings stalking untroubledly along the sloppy walk in the direction of the library, for all the world as if Jonesie’s passionate utterances had been benedictions and blessings. Gee, it was enough to make a fellow doubt the efficacy of condemnation! Jonesie flattened his somewhat button-like nose against the pane in order to watch his enemy’s ascent of the library steps. It was February, and such things as steps and walks were treacherous surfaces of glaring ice under pools of water. But Cummings never even faltered, and Jonesie’s radiant vision of his enemy prostrate with a number of broken limbs and all sorts of mysterious internal injuries, to say nothing of outward contusions, lacerations and abrasions, faded into thin air. A prey to keen disappointment, his painfully oblique gaze unwavering, Jonesie watched Cummings disappear and the big oak door closed behind him.

Disconsolately he sank back on the window-seat, rearranged his feet on “Sparrow” Bowles’ treasured crimson silk cushion and again took up his book. But although it was one of Kingston’s corkingest sea-yarns, to-day it failed to hold Jonesie’s attention, and presently it was face-down on that young gentleman’s stomach while his thoughts pursued the hated Cummings.

Cummings, you must know, had dealt a frightful blow at Jonesie’s dignity. Cummings might call it a joke, but its victim viewed it rather as a dastardly attempt to disgrace him. It had started with a perfectly excusable confusion of words on Jonesie’s part; and if blame lay anywhere save on Cummings it lay on the English language, which contained words that looked alike and meant differently.

Cummings, who roomed next door, had dropped in to borrow an eraser, and while Jonesie, who didn’t possess such a thing, was obligingly rummaging through the cherished treasures of the absent room-mate, Cummings’s reptilian eye had fallen on a composition on which his host had been engaged and which he had left on the table. Jonesie had next heard a choking sound from the visitor and had then witnessed his hurried departure, composition in hand. Surprised, Jonesie had made outcry. Then, suspicious, nay, chilled with dire apprehension, he had given chase. But a moment of delay had been his undoing. Below on the steps, where, since it was a mild, thawing day, most of the inhabitants of the dormitory were awaiting two o’clock recitations, Cummings was already reading aloud Jonesie’s epochal essay. “‘The ancient Greeks,’” gurgled the traitorous Cummings, “‘had a law forbidding a man to have more than one wife.’” The reader’s voice broke, and Jonesie felt that the tears were near his eyes. “‘This they called monotony!’”

“Well, what’s wrong with it?” Jonesie had demanded indignantly, striving to recover the paper. And that, somehow, had increased the hilarity. After that it was no use pretending that he had discovered the mistake and was in the act of remedying it when Cummings had entered, no use declaring, as a final desperate resort, that he had purposely written it that way for fun. No one believed him, no one even listened to him. Everyone just laughed and laughed! For a minute Jonesie had laughed, too, but he couldn’t keep it up. And Cummings had waved the beastly paper out of his reach and gurgled “‘This they called monotony’” over and over, until Jonesie’s temper had fled and he had kicked at Cummings’s shins and promised to get even if it took him a million years! He had said other things, too, which we won’t set down here. And his tormentor had simply laughed and choked and gurgled, and fought him off weakly until, after awhile, a lucky grab had secured the torn and wrinkled paper and Jonesie had fled back to his room with it. Since then life had been a horrible nightmare. His appearance in class rooms had been the signal for idiotic grins and whisperings. The demure smiles of the instructors showed to what far distances the story had spread. Dining hall was a torture chamber. “What was that law the ancient Greeks had, Jonesie?” came to him across the table, or “Guess I’ll try the apple sauce, Billy, just to vary the monotony.”

As I have said, the month was February, and February at prep school corresponds to August in the larger world. It’s the “silly season.” The weather is too utterly “punk” for outdoor life. Detestable thaws ruin sledding, skating and skiing. It is still too early for Spring sports. Even mid-year examinations are things of the past. Gray skies, frequent rains, rotten ice, slush and mud: that’s February. Studying wearies, reading palls, one tires of everything. Room-mates who have lived together in harmony for months throw hair-brushes at each other and don’t speak for days at a time. It is, in brief, a deadly dull, wearisome season, a season in which the healthy boy welcomes anything that promises to enliven his pallid existence, when mischief finds its innings and when the weakest, sorriest joke is hailed as roaring farce. At almost any other time the jest on Jonesie would have been laughed at good-naturedly and forgotten the next day, but now it was a thing to be treasured and acclaimed, nourished and perpetuated. Jonesie knew that until baseball practice started, or—or one of the school dormitories burned to the ground or something equally interesting happened, he would not hear the end of that putrid joke, and that if he had ever been uncertain of the correct meaning of the word monotony that uncertainty was gone!

Disturbed by such knowledge, he stirred fretfully and the book fell to the floor and lay there unheeded while his thoughts engaged the subject of curses. He had always understood that a curse if properly formulated and delivered with earnestness and solemnity invariably did the business. Only just before Christmas Recess he had read a corking story in which a quite ordinary curse had worked wonders. He tried to find flaws in the maledictions he had cast on Cummings but couldn’t. As he recalled them they were perfectly regular, standard curses, and he didn’t see why nothing had happened. Of course, it might be that curses didn’t act right off quick. Or it might be—and Jonesie gave a mental jump at the thought—that it was necessary to sort of help the curse along. Maybe it wasn’t enough to just launch it: maybe you were supposed to get behind and shove! In other words, if he wanted ill-fortune in its most dreaded form to overwhelm the obnoxious Cummings perhaps he had better set his mind at work and sort of—sort of think of something! Not a bad idea at all! Besides, hadn’t he most earnestly promised Cummings to get even with him? He had. Therefor——.

Jonesie knit his troubled brow and half closed his innocent gray-blue eyes and gave himself to the problem. There was no use in attempting physical punishment, for Cummings was seventeen and Jonesie fourteen, and Cummings was tall and broad and mighty and Jonesie was only what his age warranted. No, what was needed, what was demanded was a revenge that would hold Cummings up to public ridicule as Jonesie had been held up and keep him suspended until the world tired of laughing. But just how——.

The door of the adjoining room banged shut and Jonesie knew that Cummings had returned from the library. A second bang proclaimed books deposited on the table. He hoped Cummings had failed to get what he wanted. One usually did at the school library. He heard his hated neighbor draw his chair to the window and heard it creak under its load. If only, thought Jonesie, it would give way instead of always threatening to! Eying the door between the rooms that hid the enemy from sight, Jonesie contemplated a fresh curse; something with more “pep” than yesterday’s; less academic and more in the vernacular. But that would necessitate arising, and he was very comfortable, and he decided to give the original curse another twenty-four hours to deliver the goods; meanwhile, of course, aiding and abetting said curse to the best of his ability so soon as his cogitations should suggest——.