The Project Gutenberg EBook of Play the Game!, by Ruth Comfort Mitchell This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: Play the Game! Author: Ruth Comfort Mitchell Release Date: May 27, 2007 [EBook #21625] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PLAY THE GAME! *** Produced by Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) PLAY THE GAME! BY RUTH COMFORT MITCHELL D. APPLETON AND COMPANY NEW YORK :: LONDON :: 1924 COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY Copyright, 1920, by The Crowell Publishing Company PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA TO MY BROTHERS Books by RUTH COMFORT MITCHELL CORDUROY NARRATIVES IN VERSE JANE JOURNEYS ON PLAY THE GAME D. APPLETON AND COMPANY New York London CONTENTS CHAPTER I CHAPTER II CHAPTER III CHAPTER IV CHAPTER V CHAPTER VI CHAPTER VII CHAPTER VIII CHAPTER IX CHAPTER X CHAPTER XI CHAPTER XII CHAPTER XIII CHAPTER XIV CHAPTER XV CHAPTER XVI PLAY THE GAME! CHAPTER I [Pg 1] There was no denying the fact that Honor Carmody liked the boys. No one ever attempted to deny it, least of all Honor herself. When she finished grammar school her mother and her gay young stepfather told her they had decided to send her to Marlborough rather than to the Los Angeles High School. The child looked utterly aghast. "Oh," she said, "I wouldn't like that at all. I don't believe I could. I couldn't bear it!" "My dear," her mother chided, "don't be silly! It's a quite wonderful school, known all over the country. Girls are sent there from Chicago and New York, and even Boston. You'll be with the best girls, the very nicest——" "That's just it," Honor interrupted, forlornly. "What do you mean?" "Girls. Just girls. Oodles and oodles of nothing but girls. Honestly, Muzzie, I don't think I could stand it." She was a large, substantial young creature with a broad brow and hearty coloring and candid eyes. Her stepfather was sure she would never have her mother's beauty, but he was almost equally sure that she would never need it. He studied her closely and her actions and reactions intrigued him. He laughed, now, and his wife turned mildly shocked eyes on him. "Stephen, dear! Don't encourage her in being queer. I don't like her to be queer." Mrs. Lorimer was not in the least queer herself, unless, indeed, it was queer to be startlingly lovely and girlish and appealing at forty-one, with a second husband and six children. She was not an especially motherly person except in moments of reproof and then she always spoke in a remote third person. "Honor, Mother wants you to be more with girls." Then, as if to make it clear that she was not merely advancing a personal whim,—"You need to be more with girls." "Why?" "Why—why because Mother says you do." Mrs. Lorimer did not like to argue. She always got out of breath and warm-looking. Her daughter dropped on the floor at her feet. Mrs. Lorimer had small, happy-looking, lily-of-the-field hands and Honor took one of them between her hard brown paws and squeezed it. "I know, but—why do you say so? I don't know anything about girls. Why should I, when I've had eight boy cousins and five boy brothers and"—she gave Stephen Lorimer a brief, friendly grin—"and two boy fathers!" Her stepfather was not really younger than his wife but he was incurably boyish. The girl grew earnest. "Please, pretty-please, let me go to L. A. High! I've counted on it so! And"—she was as intent and free from self-consciousness as a terrier at a rat hole—"all the boys I know are going to L. A. High! And Jimsy's going, and he'll need me!" Her stepfather laughed again and lighted a cigarette. "She has you there, Mildred. He will need her." "Of course he will." Honor turned a grateful face to him. "I'll have to do all his English and Latin for him, so he can get signed up every week and play football!" Mrs. Lorimer did not see why her daughter's finishing need be curtailed by young James King's athletic activities and she started in to say so with vigor and emphasis, but her husband held up his long beautifully modeled hand rather in the manner of a traffic policeman and stopped her. "Look here, Mildred," he said, "suppose you and I convene in special session and consider this thing from all angles and then let her know what it comes to,—shall we? Run along, Top Step!" "All right, Stepper," said the child, relievedly. "You explain it to her." She went contentedly away and a moment later they heard her robust young voice lifted on the lawn next door,—"Jim-zee! Oh, Jimsy! Come-mawn-out!" "You see?" Mrs. Lorimer wanted rather inaccurately to know. "That's what we've got to stop, Stephen." He smiled. "But—as your eldest offspring just now inquired—why?" "Why?" She lifted her hands and let them fall into her lap again, palm upward, and regarded him in gentle exasperation. "Stephen, you know, really, sometimes I feel that you are not a bit of help to me with the children." "Sometimes you do, I daresay," he granted her, serenely, "but most of the time you must be simply starry-eyed with gratitude over the brilliant way I manage them. Come along over here and we'll talk it over!" He patted the place beside him on the couch. "You mean," said his wife a little sulkily, going, nevertheless, "that you'll talk me over!" "That is my secret hope," said Stephen Lorimer. It was all quite true. He did manage her children and their children—there were three of each—with astonishing ease and success. They amused him, and adored him. He understood them utterly. Honor was seven when her own father died and nine when her mother married again. Stephen Lorimer would never forget her first inspection of him. Nursemaids had done their worst on the subject of stepfathers; fairy tales had presented the pattern. He knew exactly what was going on in her mind, and—quite as earnestly beneath his persiflage as he had set himself to woo the widow [Pg 2] [Pg 3] [Pg 4] [Pg 5] —he set himself to win her daughter. It was a matter of moments only before he saw the color coming back into her square little face and the horror seeping out of her eyes. It was a matter of days only until she sought him out and told him, in her mother's presence, that she believed she liked him better than her first father. "Honor, dear! You—you mustn't, really——" Mildred Lorimer insisted with herself on being shocked. "Don't you, Muzzie? Don't you like him better?" the child wanted persistently to know. "He was very nice, of course; I did like him awfully. But he was always 'way off Down Town ... at The Office. We didn't have any fun with him. Stepper's always home. I'm glad we married a newspaper one this time." "Stephen, that dreadful name.... What will people think?" Her new husband didn't in the least care. He and Honor had gravely considered on that first day what they should call each other. It seemed to Stephen Lorimer that it was hardly fair to the gentleman who had stayed so largely at The Office to have his big little daughter and his tiny sons calling his successor Father or Dad, and Papa with all its shades and shifts of accent left him cold. "Let's see, Honor. 'Stepfather' as a salutation sounds rather accusing, doesn't it? 'Step-pa,' now, is less austere, but——" "Oh, Stephen, dear!" They were not consulting Mrs. Lorimer at all. "I've got it! It's an inspiration! 'Stepper!' Neat, crisp, brisk. Means, if any one should ask you, 'Step-pa' and also, literally, stepper; a stepper; one who steps—into another's place." "Stephen——" "Well, haven't I, my dear?" He considered the three young Carmodys, nine, seven, and five. "Steps yourselves, aren't you? Honor's the top step and——" "Oh, Stepper, call me Top Step! I like that." "Right. And Billy's Bottom Step and Ted's the Tweeny! Now we're all set!" "Yes," said Honor, contentedly. She herded her little brothers out of the room and came back alone. "But—what'll I tell people you are?" "Why, I think," he considered, "you're young enough and trusting enough to call me A Writer." "I mean, are you Muzzie's step-husband, too?" It was the first time she had seen the lightness leave his eyes. "No. No. I am your moth—I am her husband. There is no step there." He got up and walked over to where his wife was sitting and towered over her. He was a tall man and he looked especially tall at that moment. "Her plain—husband. Extremely plain, as it happens"—he was himself again for an instant—"but—her husband." It seemed to the child that he had forgotten which one of them had asked him the question and was addressing himself to her mother by mistake. He seemed at once angry and demanding and anxious, and she had never seen her mother so pink. However, her question had been answered and she had affairs of her own. She went away without a backward glance so she did not see her stepfather drop to his knees beside the chair and gather the quiet woman roughly into his arms, nor hear his insistent voice. "Her husband. The first—husband—she— ever had. Say it, Mildred. Say it." And now Honor was thirteen and a half, and tardily ready for High School, and there were three little Lorimers, twins and a six months' old single. Stephen Lorimer, who had been a singularly footloose world rover, had settled down securely in the old Carmody house on South Figueroa Street. He was intensely proud of his paternity, personal and vicarious, and took it not seriously but joyously. He was dramatic critic and special writer for the leading newspaper of Los Angeles, and theoretically he worked by night and slept by day, but as a matter of puzzling fact he did not sleep at all, unless one counted his brief morning naps. His eyes, in consequence, seemed never to be quite open, but nothing, nevertheless, escaped them. An outsider, looking in on them now, the erect, hot-cheeked, imperious woman, a little insolent always of her beauty, and the lolling, lounging man with the drooping lids, would have placed his odds unhesitatingly on her winning of any point she might have in mind. Even Mildred Lorimer herself, after four years and a half of being married to him, thought she would win out over him this time. Honor was the only daughter she had, the only daughter she would ever have, for she had definitely decided, at forty-one, to cease her dealings with the long-legged bird who had flapped six times to her roof, and it seemed intolerable to her that—with five boys—her one girl should be so robustly ungirlish. "Now, then, let's have it. You want Honor to go to Marlborough. As she herself asked and I myself repeated,—why?" "And as I answered you both," said his wife, trying hard to keep the conversation spinning lightly in the air as he did, "it's because I want her to be more like other girls." "And I," said her husband, "do not." This was the place for Mildred Lorimer to fling her own why but her husband was too quick for her. "Because she is so much finer and sounder and saner and sweeter as she is. Mildred, I have never seen any living creature so selfless. What was the word they coined in that play about Mars?—'Otherdom?' That's it, yes; otherdom. That's Honor Carmody. She could have finished grammar school at twelve, but Jimsy needed her help." [Pg 6] [Pg 7] [Pg 8] [Pg 9] [Pg 10] "That's just it! Can't you see how wrong that is?" "No. I'm too much occupied with seeing how right it is. Good Lord, my dear, in a world given over to the first person perpendicular, can't you see the amazing beauty and rarity of your child's soul? Every day and all day long she gives herself,—to you, to me, to the kiddies, to her friends. She is the eternal mother." Mildred Lorimer was not the eternal mother. She was not in fact a mother at all. The physical fact of motherhood had six times descended upon her and she was doing her gentle, well-bred, conscientious best in six lively directions, but under it all she was forever Helen, forever the best beloved. She was getting rather beyond her depth but she was not giving up. Stephen, in discussion, had an elusive way of soaring into hazy generalities. She brought him down. "I can't see why it should make her any less unselfish to attend the best girls' school than to—to run with the boys." She brought out the little vulgarism with a faint curl of her lovely lip. "'Run with the boys!' That has a positively Salem flavor, hasn't it? Almost as deadly, that 'with,' as 'after,'" He loved words, Stephen Lorimer; he played with them and juggled them. "Yet isn't that exactly what the girls of to-day must and should do? Isn't it what the girls of to-morrow—naturally, unrebuked—will do? Not running after them, slyly or brazenly; not sitting at home, crimped and primped and curled, waiting to be run after. No," he said hotly, getting up and beginning to swallow up the room from wall to wall with his long strides, "no! With them. Running with them, chin in, chest out, sound, conditioned, unashamed!" He believed that he meant to write a tremendous book, one day, Honor's stepfather. He often reeled off whole chapters in his mind, warm and glowing. It was only when he got it down on paper that it cooled and congealed. "Running with them in the race—for the race——" his hurtling promenade took him to the window and he paused for an instant. "Come here, Mildred. Look at her!" Mildred Lorimer came to join him. On the shabby, rusty lawn of the King place, next door, all the rustier for its nearness to their own emerald turf, sat Honor Carmody and Jimsy King, jointly and severally lacing up a football. "Yes, look at her!" said her mother with feeling. "Leave her alone, Mildred. Leave her alive!" The two children were utterly absorbed. The boy was half a head taller than the girl, heavier, sturdier, of a startling beauty. There was a stubborn, much reviled wave in his bronze hair and his eyes were a dark hazel flecked with black. His skin was bronze, too, bronzed by many Catalina summer and winter swims at Ocean Park. It made his teeth seem very white and flashing. The window was open to the soft Southern California air, and the voices came across to the watchers. "Hold it!" "I am holding it!" A handsome man of forty came up the tree-shaded street, not quite steadily, and turned into the King's walk. His hat was pulled low over his eyes and the collar of his coat was turned up in spite of the mildness of the day. He nodded to the boy and girl as he went past them and on into the house. "Again!" said Mrs. Lorimer, tragically. "That's the second time this week!" "Rough on the kid," said her husband. "See him now." Jimsy King had turned his head and was following his father's slow progress up the steps and across the porch and into the house. "Be in in a minute, Dad!" he called after him. "Loyal little beggar. I saw him steering him up Broadway one morning, just at school time. Pluck." Honor had looked after James King, the elder, too, and then at his son, and then at the football in her hands again. "Hurry up," she commanded. "Pull it tighter! Tighter! Do you call that pulling?" Inexorably she got his attention back to the subject in hand. "That makes it all the worse," said Mrs. Lorimer. "Of course they're only children—babies, really—but I couldn't have anything.... It's bad blood, Stephen. I couldn't have my child interested in one of the 'Wild Kings'!" "Well, you won't have, if you're wise. Let 'em alone. Let 'em lace footballs on the front lawn ... and they won't hold hands on the side porch! Why, woman dear, like the well-known Mr. Job, the thing you greatly fear you'll bring to pass! Shut her up in a girls' school—even the best and sanest—and you'll make boys suddenly into creatures of romance, remote, desirable. Don't emphasize and underline for her. She's as clean as a star and as unself-conscious as a puppy! Don't hurry her into what one of those English play-writing chaps calls—Granville Barker, isn't it?—Yes, —Madras House—'the barnyard drama of sex.... Male and female created He them ... but men and women are a long time in the making!'" The lacing of the football was finished. The boy lifted his head and looked soberly at the door through which his father had entered, not quite steadily. Then he drew a long breath, threw back his shining bronze head, said something in a low tone to the girl, and ran into the house. [Pg 11] [Pg 12] [Pg 13] [Pg 14] Honor Carmody got to her feet and stood looking after him, the odd mothering look in her square child's face. She stood so for long moments, without moving, and her mother and her stepfather watched her. Suddenly Stephen Lorimer flung the window up as far as it would go and leaned out. "It's all right, Top Step," he called, meeting the leaping gladness of her glance. "We've decided, your mother and I. You're going to L. A. High! You're going——" but now he dropped his voice and spoke only for the woman beside him, slipping a penitent and conciliatory arm about her, his eyes impish, "you're going to run with the boys!" CHAPTER II The "Wild Kings" had lived in their fine old house ever since the neighborhood could remember. The first and probably the wildest of them had come out from Virginia when Los Angeles was still a drowsing Spanish village, bringing with him an aged and excellent cellar and a flock of negro servants. Honor's Carmody grandmother could remember the picturesqueness of his entourage, of James King himself, the hard-riding, hard-drinking, soft-spoken cavalier with his proud, pale wife and his slim, high-stepping horses and his grinning blacks. The general conviction was, Grandmother Carmody said, that he had come—or been sent—west to make a fresh start. There was something rather pathetically naïve about that theory. There could never be a fresh start for the "Wild Kings" in a world of excellent cellars and playing cards. In a surprisingly short time he had re-created his earlier atmosphere for himself—an atmosphere of charm and cheer and color ... and pride and shame and misery, in which his wife and children lived and moved and had their being. In the early eighties he built the big beautiful house on South Figueroa Street, moved the last of his negro servitors and the last of his cellar and his young family into it and died. Since that day Kings had come and gone in it, big, bonny creatures, liked and sighed over, and the house was shabby now, cracked and peeling for the want of paint, the walks grass-grown, the lawn frowzy, lank and stringy curtains at the dim windows. There were only three bottles of the historic cellar left now, precious, cob-webbed; there was only one of the blacks, an ancient, crabbed crone of the second generation, with a witch's hand at cookery and a witch's temper. And there were only James King III and James King IV, his son, Honor's Jimsy, left of the line in the old home. The negress fed and mended them; an infrequent Japanese came in to make futile efforts on house and garden. The neighbors said, "How do you do, Mr. King? Like summer, really, isn't it?" and looked hastily away. One never could be sure of finding him quite himself. Even if he walked quite steadily he might not be able to talk quite steadily, but he was always a King, always sure of his manner, be he ever so unsure of his feet or his tongue. He had been worse since his wife died, when the boy was still a toddler. She was a slim, sandy-haired Scotch girl with steady eyes and a prominent chin, who had married him to reform him, and the neighbors were beginning to think she was in a fair way to compass it when she died. No one had ever been able to pity Jeanie King; she had been as proud as the pale lady who came with the first "Wild King" from Virginia. There was that about the Kings; it had to be granted that their women always stuck; they must have had compensating traits and graces. No King wife ever gave up or deserted save by death, and no King wife ever wept on a neighbor's shoulder. And now they had all wandered back to Virginia or up to Alaska or down to Mexico, and there was not an uncle or cousin of his tribe left in Los Angeles for Jimsy King; only his bad, beloved father, coming home at noon in rumpled evening dress, but wearing it better and more handily, for all that, than any other man on the block. It was agreed that there was no chance for Jimsy to escape the heritage of his blood. People were kind about it, but very firm. "If his mother had lived he might have had a chance, the poor boy," Mrs. Lorimer would sigh, "but with that father, and that home life, and that example——" "My dear," said Stephen Lorimer, "can't you see what you are doing? By you I mean the neighborhood. You are holding his heredity up like a hoop for him to jump through!" Honor's stepfather held that there might be a generous share of the firm-chinned Scotch mother in Jimsy. Certainly it was a fighting chance; he was living in a day of less warmth and color than his father and his forbears; there were more outlets for his interest and his energy. His father, for instance, had not played football. Jimsy had played as soon as he could walk alone—football, baseball, basketball, handball, water polo; life was a hard and tingling game to him. "It's an even chance," said Stephen Lorimer, "and if Honor's palling with him can swing it, can we square it with ourselves to take her away from him?" He carried his point, as usual, and the boy and the girl started in at Los Angeles High on the same day. Honor decided on the subjects which Jimsy could most safely take—the things he was strongest in, the weak subjects in which she was strong. There was an inexorable rule about being signed up by every teacher for satisfactory work on Friday afternoon before a Saturday football game; it was as a law of the Medes and Persians; even the teachers who adored him most needs must abide by it. There was no cajoling any of them; even the pretty, ridiculously young thing who taught Spanish maintained a Gibraltar-like firmness. "You'll simply have to study, Jimsy, that's all," said Honor. "Study, yes, but that's not learning, Skipper!" (She had been that ever since her first entirely seaworthy summer at Catalina.) "I can study, if I have to, but that's not saying I'll get anything into my sconce! I'm pretty slow in the head!" [Pg 15] [Pg 16] [Pg 17] [Pg 18] [Pg 19] "I know you are," said Honor, sighing. "Of course, you've been so busy with other things. Think what you've done in athletics!" "Fast on the feet and slow in the head," he grinned. "Well, I'll die trying. But you've got to stand by, Skipper." "Of course. I'll do your Latin and English and part of your Spanish." "Gee, you're a brick." "It's nothing." She dismissed it briefly. "It's my way of doing something, Jimsy, that's all. It's the only way I can be on the team." She glowed pinkly at the thought. "When I sit up on the bleachers and see you make a touchdown and hear 'em yell—why I'm there! I'm on the team because I've helped a little to keep you on the team! It almost makes up for having to be a girl. Just for the moment, I'm not sitting up high, clean and starched and safe; I'm on the field, hot and muddy and with my nose bleeding, doing something for L. A.! I'm there!" Jimsy slapped her on the shoulder like a man and brother. "You're there all the time, Skipper! You're there a million!" He made the first team the first day he went out to practice. There was no denying him. He captained the team the second year and every year until he graduated, a year late for all his friend's unwearying toil. As a matter of fact they did not make a special effort to get him through on time; the team needed him, the squad needed him, L. A. needed him. It was more like a college than a High School in those days, with its numbers and its spirit, that strong, intangible evidence of things not seen. There was something about it, a concentrated essence of Jimsy King and hundreds of lesser Jimsy Kings, which made it practically unconquerable. In the year before his final one the team reached its shining perfection and held it to the end. It is still a name to conjure with at the school on the hill, Jimsy King's. The old teachers remember; the word comes down. "A regular old-time L. A. team—the fighting spirit. Like the days of Jimsy King!" Other teams might score on them; frequently they could not, but when they did the rooting section was not dashed. It lifted up its multiple voice, young, insolent, unafraid, in mocking song, and Honor Carmody, just on the edge of the section, beside her stepfather, sang with them: You can't beat L. A. High! You can't beat L. A. High! Use your team to get up steam But you can't beat L. A. High! It rolled out over the football field and echoed away in the soft Southern California air. It was gay, inexorable; you couldn't beat L. A. High, field or bleachers. Stephen Lorimer never missed a game. His wife went once and never again. "I suppose I am too sensitive," she said, "but I can't help it. It's the way I'm made. I simply cannot endure seeing anything so brutal. I can't understand those young girls ... and the mothers!" Two of her own were on the second team, now, but she never saw them play, and they came in the back way, after games and practice, sneaking up to Honor's room with their black eyes and their gory noses for her capable first aid. She was not one, Mildred Lorimer, into whose blood something of the iron had entered. Her boys bewildered her as they grew and toughened out of baby fiber. She was a little unhappy about it, but she was more beautiful than she had ever been in her life, and freer, with the last little Lorimer shifting sturdily for himself and his father more in love with her than ever. She had more or less resigned her active motherhood to him. The things she might have done for Honor, the selection of her frocks and hats, the color scheme of her room, her parties, the girl at seventeen did efficiently for herself. Her childish squareness of face and figure was rounding out rather splendidly and she had a sure and dependable sense of what to wear. Her things were good in line and color, smartly simple. She had thick braids of honey-colored hair wound round her head; her brow was broad and calm, her gray eyes serene; she had a fresh and hearty color. Stephen Lorimer believed that she had a voice. She sang like one of the mocking birds in her garden, joyously, radiantly, riotously, and her stepfather, who knew amazingly many great persons, persuaded a famous artist to hear her when she gave her concert in Los Angeles. "Yes," she said, nodding her head, "it is a voice. It is a voice. A little teaching, yes; this Barrett woman who was once my pupil, she will be safe with her. Not too much; not too much singing. Finish your school, my little one. Then you shall come over to me for a year, yes? We shall see what we shall see!" She patted her cheek and sent her out of the room ahead of Stephen. "Well?" he wanted to know. "But yes, a voice, as I have said. Send her to me when her schooling is over." "She has a future?" The great contralto shrugged her thick shoulders. "I fear not. I think not." His face lengthened. "Why?" "Because, my friend, she will care more for living. She will not care so greatly to get, that large child. She will only give. She has not the fine relentless selfishness to make the artist. Well, we shall see. Life may break her. Send her to me. In [Pg 20] [Pg 21] [Pg 22] [Pg 23] two years, yes? No, no, I will have no thanks. It is so small a thing to do.... One grows fat and old; it is good to have youngness near. Now, go, my friend. I shall gargle my throat and sleep." She gave him a hot, plump hand to kiss. Honor was not especially impressed. She rather thought, when the time came, she should prefer to go to Stanford, but she liked her music lessons, meanwhile. It filled up her time, the business of singing, in that last year when she was more or less marking time and helping Jimsy through. Her stepfather watched her with growing amazement. So far as any one might judge, and to Mrs. Lorimer's tearful relief, Honor's attitude toward the last of the "Wild Kings" was at seventeen what it had been at twelve, at six. "I was right, wasn't I?" Stephen wanted to know. "Well ... if you can only keep on being right about it! I'm so thankful about her singing. That year abroad will be wonderful. She'll meet new people ... real men." "Young Jimsy is exhibiting every known symptom of becoming a real man." "Yes, but he's a King." "That appears to be the universal opinion regarding him." "Stephen dear, don't be ridiculous! You've always been as bewitched about the boy as Honor herself." Mrs. Lorimer was dressed for a luncheon and her husband, heavy-eyed and flushed of face, had cut short his late morning sleep to drive her. She was still for him the everlasting Helen. "Mildred," he said, quitting the battlefield for the eternal balcony, "do you know that you are lovelier this instant than you were the day I married you?" Mrs. Lorimer knew it quite well. It was due somewhat to good management as well as luck, and she liked having the results appreciated. She let him kiss her, carefully, because she had her hat on. The elder James King did not seem to age with the years. "He is," Stephen Lorimer said facetiously, "only too well preserved!" His manner and mode of life remained the same, save that he lost more heavily at cards. For the first time in its history the old King place was mortgaged. In a day when every one who was any one, as Honor's mother put it, was getting a motor car, the Kings had none. Jimsy, of course, rode regally in every one else's. The Lorimers had two, an electric in which Honor's mother glided softly with her little whirring bell from clubs to luncheons and from luncheons to teas, and a rough and ready seven-passenger affair into which the whole tribe might be piled, and which Honor Carmody drove better than her stepfather, who was apt to dream at the wheel. On Sundays Stephen Lorimer took them all, Jimsy, Honor, Billy and Ted Carmody, the Lorimer twins and the last little Lorimer, on motor picnics to the beach. They drove to Santa Monica, down the Palisades, up the narrow, winding, wave-washed road to the Malibou Ranch and built a fire and broiled chops and made coffee and baked potatoes, after their swim, ate like refugees and slept like puppies on the sand. In the afternoon, when they came back to the gracious old house in its wide garden on South Figueroa Street Mildred Lorimer would be waiting, in a frock he loved, to give her husband his tea, cool, lovely, remote from the rougher fun of life. In the evenings—Sunday evenings—Honor held her joyous At Homes. Three or four favored girls and a dozen boys came to supper, a loud, hilarious meal. Takasugi, the cook, and Kada, the second boy, were given their freedom. Honor, in the quaint aprons her stepfather had picked up here and there over the world, pink, capable, with the assistance of Jimsy and her biggest brothers, got supper. It was a lively feast. Jimsy King, in one of Kada's white jackets, waited on the table. They ate enormously, and when they had finished they pronounced their ungodly grace—a thunderous tattoo on the table edge, begun with palms and finished with elbows— None-but-the-righteous-shall-be-Saved!— followed, while the cups and plates were still leaping and shuddering, with its secular second verse— My-sister-Mary-walks-like-This! "Well, Top Step," said Stephen one of those evenings, "eleven boys beside the stand-by Jimsy. Fair to middling popularity, I should say!" "Popularity?" She opened her candid eyes wide at him. "Why, Stepper, you know it's not that! They don't come to see me! They don't mind me, of course, but it's the eats, and meeting each other,—and mostly Jimsy, I guess! Mercy,—the chocolate's boiling over!" She clearly believed it, and it was more or less true. The Carmody home of a Sunday night was a sort of glorified club house without rules or dues or by-laws. It was the thing to do, if one were so lucky. It rather placed a boy in the scheme of things to be one of "the Sunday-night bunch." Jimsy was the Committee on Membership. "Let's have that Burke boy out to supper Sunday, shan't we?" Honor would say. "He's doing so well on the team." [Pg 24] [Pg 25] [Pg 26] [Pg 27] "No," Jimsy would answer, definitely. "Not at the house, Skipper." Honor accepted his judgments unquestioningly. Some way, with the deep wisdom of boys, he knew, better than she could, that the young Burke person was better on the field than in the drawing-room. There was nothing snobbish in their gatherings; shabby boys came, girls who had made their own little dimity dresses. It was the intangible, inexorable caste of the best boyhood, and Honor knew, comfortably, that her particular King could do no wrong. The rooting section had a special yell for Jimsy, when he had sped down the field to a touchdown or kicked a difficult goal. It followed the regular High School yell, hair-lifting in its fierceness: King! King! King! K-I-N-G, King! G-I-N-K, Gink! He's the King Gink! He's the King Gink! He's the King Gink! K-I-N-G, King! KING! and Honor utterly agreed with them. CHAPTER III The house across the street from the Carmody place was suddenly sold. People were curious and a little anxious. Every one on that block had been there for a generation or so; there was a sense of permanence about them all—even the Kings. "Eastern people," said Mrs. Lorimer. "A mother, rather delicate-looking, and one son, eighteen or nineteen I should say. He's frail-looking, too, and he limps a little. I imagine they're very nice. Everything about them"—her magazine reading had taken her quite reasonably to a front window the day the newcomers' furniture was uncrated and carried in —"seems very nice." She hoped, if it developed that they really were desirable that they would be permanent. Los Angeles was coming to have such a floating population.... Honor and Jimsy observed the boy from across the street, a slim, modish person. "Gee," said Jimsy, "it must be fierce to be lame!—to have your body not—not do what you tell it to! I wonder what he does? He can't do anything, can he?" His eyes were deep with honest pity. "Oh, I suppose he sort of fills in with other things," Honor conceded. "I expect, if people can't do the things that count most, they go in for other things. He seems awfully keen about his two cars." "They're peaches, both of 'em," said Jimsy without envy. "And of course he has time to be a wonder at school, if he wants to be." "Yep. Looks as if he might be a shark at it." He grinned. "Slow on his feet but fast in the head." "Muzzie's going to call on his mother, and then we'd better ask him to supper, hadn't we? He must be horribly lonesome." "I'll float over and see him," the last King suggested, "and sort of size him up. Give him the once-over. We don't want to start anything unless he's O. K. Might as well go now, I guess." "All right. Come in afterward and tell me what you think of him." He nodded and swung off across the street. It was an hour before he came back, glowing. "Gee, Skipper, I'm strong for that kid! Name's Van Meter, Carter Van Meter. He's got a head on him, that boy! He's been everywhere and seen everything—three times abroad—Canada, Mexico! You ought to hear him talk—not a bit up-stagy, no side at all, but interesting! I asked him for supper, Sunday night. You'll be crazy about him—all the bunch will!" Thus Jimsy King on the day Carter Van Meter limped into his life; thus Jimsy King through the years which followed, worshiping humbly the things he did not have in himself, belittling his own gifts, enlarging his own lacks, glorifying his friend. He had never had a deeply intimate boy friend before; the team was his friend, the squad; Honor had sufficed for a nearer tie. It was to be different, now; a sharing. She was to resent a little in the beginning, before she, too, came under the spell of the boy from the East. Mrs. Lorimer came smiling back from her call. "Very nice," she told her husband and her daughter, "really charming. And her things are quite wonderful ... rare rugs ... portraits of ancestors. A widow. Here for her health, and the boy's health; he's never been strong. All she has in the world ... wrapped up in him. Very Eastern!"—she laughed at the memory. "She said, 'And from what part of the East do you come, Mrs. Lorimer?' When I said I was born here in Los Angeles she almost gasped, and then she flushed and said, 'Oh, really? Is it possible? But I met some people on shipboard, once—the time before last when I was crossing—who were natives, and they were quite delightful.'" [Pg 28] [Pg 29] [Pg 30] [Pg 31] [Pg 32] "The word 'native' intrigues them," said Stephen, drawing off her long, limp suede gloves and smoothing them. "I daresay she'll be looking for war whoops and tomahawks. And if it comes to that, we can furnish the former, especially Sunday night." "Muzzie, did you meet the boy?" Honor wanted to know. "Yes. He came in for tea with us. A beautifully mannered boy. Very much at ease. We must have him here, Honor." "Yes, Jimsy's already asked him for Sunday night, Muzzie. Jimsy likes him." "Well, he may. He has a something ... I don't know what it is, exactly, but he will be good for all of you." "We'll be good for him, too," said her daughter, calmly. "It must be fearfully dull for him, not knowing any one, and being lame." He came to supper, a trim young glass of fashion, and it was he, the stranger, who was entirely at his ease, and the "bunch," the gay, accustomed bunch, which was a little shy and constrained. Jimsy stood sponsor for him and Honor was an earnest hostess. He said he enjoyed himself; certainly he made himself gently agreeable to Mrs. Lorimer, to the girls. Honor's stepfather observed him with his undying curiosity. He was a plain boy with a look of past pain in his colorless face, a shadowed bitterness in his eyes, a droop at the corners of his mouth when he was not speaking. For all his two motor cars and his rare old rugs and the portraits of ancestors and his idolized only sonship, life had clearly withheld from him the things he had wanted most. There was a baffled imperiousness about him, Stephen decided. "A clever youngster," he told his wife, watching him from across the room. "Brains. But I don't like him." "Stephen! Why not?" He shook his head. "I don't know yet. But I know. I had a curious sense, as he came limping into the room to-night, of 'Enter the villain.'" "My dear,—that poor, frail boy, with his lovely, gentle manners!" "I know. It does sound rather piffle. Daresay I'm wrong. The kids will size him up." When Carter Van Meter came to tell his hostess good-by, he smiled winningly. "This has been very jolly, Mrs. Lorimer. It was good of you to let me come. Mother asked me to say how much she appreciated it. But"—he hesitated—"May I come in some afternoon when—just you and Miss Honor are here?" He looked wistful, and frailer at the end of the evening than he had at the beginning. "Of course you may, my dear boy!" Mrs. Lorimer gave him the glory of her special smile. "Come soon!" He came the next day but one, and as her mother was at a bridge afternoon it was Honor who entertained him. She had just come home from High School and she wore a middy blouse and a short skirt and looked less than her years. "Let's sit in the garden, shan't we?—I hate being indoors a minute more than I can help!" She led the way across the green, springy lawn to the little rustic building over which the vivid Bougainvillæa climbed and swarmed, and he followed at his halted pace. "Besides, we can see Jimsy from here when he comes by from football practice, and call him in. I just didn't happen to go to watch practice to-day, and now"—she smiled at him,—"I'm glad I didn't." There was something intensely pitiful about this lad to her mothering young heart, for all his poise and pride. He waited gravely until she had established herself on a bench before he sat. "Tell me about this fellow King. Every one seems very keen about him." Honor leaned back and took a serge-clad knee between two tanned hands. "Well, I don't know how to begin! He's— well, he's just Jimsy King, that's all! But it's more than any other boy in the world." "You're great friends, aren't you?" "Jimsy and I? I should say we are! We've known each other ever since—well, before we could walk or talk! Our nurses used to take us out together in our buggies. We were born next door—in these two houses, on the same day. Jimsy's just about an hour older than I am!" "I have never had many friends," said Carter Van Meter. "I've been moving about so much, traveling ... other things have interfered." He never referred, directly or indirectly, to his ill health or his limp. "Well, you can have all you want now," said Honor, generously. "And Jimsy likes you!" She bestowed that like a decoration. "Honestly, I never knew him to take such a fancy to any one before in all his life. He likes every one, you know,—I mean, he never dislikes anybody, but he never gets crushes. So, it means something to have him keen about you. If he's for you, everybody will be for you." "Why do people like him so?" "Can't help it," said Honor, briefly. "Even teachers. He's not terribly clever at school, and of course he doesn't have as much time to study as some do, but the teachers are all keen about him. They know what he is. I expect that's what counts, don't you? Not what people have, or do, or know; what they are. Why, one time I happened to be in the Vice- [Pg 33] [Pg 34] [Pg 35] [Pg 36] Principal's office about something, and it was a noontime, and there was a wild rough-house down in the yard. Honestly, you couldn't hear yourself think! The Principal—he was a new man, just come—kept looking out of the window, and getting more and more nervous, and finally he said, 'Shouldn't we stop that, Mrs. Dalton?' And she looked out and laughed and said, 'Jimsy King's in it, and he'll stop it before we need to notice it!' That's what teachers think of him, and the boys—I believe they'd cut up into inch pieces for him." "I suppose it's a good deal on account of his football. He's on the team, isn't he?" His eyes disdained teams. "On the team? He is the team! Captain last year and this,—and next! Wait till you see him play. He's the fastest full back we've ever had, since anybody can remember. There'll be a game Saturday. We play Redlands. Will you come, and sit with Stepper and me?" "Thanks. I don't care very much for——" he stopped, held up by the growing amaze in her face. "Yes, I'd like very much to go with you and Mr. Lorimer. I don't care much about watching games where I don't know the people"—he retrieved and amended his earlier sentence—"but you'll explain everything to me." She grinned. "I'm afraid I won't be very nice about talking to you. I get simply wild, at games. I'm right down there, in it. I've never gotten over not being a boy! But Jimsy's wonderful about letting me have as much share in it as I can. You'll hear all sorts of tales about him, when you come to know people,—plays he's made and games he's won, and how he never, never loses his head or his temper, no matter what the other team does. If we should ever have another war, I expect he'd be a great general." Her face broke into mirth again at a memory. "Once, we were playing Pomona— imagine a high school playing a college and beating them!—and somebody was out for a minute, and Jimsy was standing waiting, with his arms folded across his chest, and he had on a head guard, and it was very still, and suddenly a girl's voice piped up—'Oh, doesn't he look just like Napoleon?' He's never heard the last of it; it fusses him awfully. I never knew anybody so modest. I suppose it's because he's always been the leader, the head of things, ever since he started kindergarten. He's used to it; it seems just natural to him." The new boy shifted his position uneasily. Honor thought perhaps he was suffering; his face looked pinched. "Shall we go in the house? Would you be more comf"—she caught herself up—"perhaps you're not used to being out of doors all the time? Eastern people find this glaring sun tiresome sometimes." "It's very nice here. You go to Los Angeles High School, too?" He didn't care about changing his position but he wanted intensely to change the subject, even if he had started it by his query. "Odd, isn't it, that you don't go to a girls' school?" Honor laughed. "That's what Muzzie thinks. She did want me to go, but I didn't want to, and Stepper—my stepfather, you know,—stood up for me. I never liked girls very much when I was little. I do now, of course. I've two or three girl friends who are wonders. I adore them. But I still like boys best. I suppose"—he saw that her mind came back like a needle to the pole—"it's on account of Jimsy. Wait till you really know him! You will be just the same. Honestly, he's the bravest, gamest person in the world. Once, a couple of years ago, Stepper noticed that he was limping, and he made him go to see the doctor. The doctor told us about it afterwards—he's the doctor who took care of our mothers when we were born. Jimsy came in and said, 'Doc, I've got a kind of a sore leg.' And the doctor looked at it and said, 'You've got a broken leg, that's what you've got! Go straight home and I'll come out and put it in a plaster cast.' You see"—she illustrated by putting the tips of her two forefingers together—"it was really broken, cracked through, but it hadn't slipped by. Well, the doctor had to stay and finish his office hours, and about an hour later he looked up and there was Jimsy, and he said, 'Say, Doc, would you just as soon set this leg to-morrow? You see, I've got a date to take Skipper—he always calls me Skipper—to a dance to-night. I won't dance, but I'll just——' and the doctor just roared at him and told him to go home that instant, and Jimsy went out, but when the doctor got to his house he wasn't there, and he had to wait about half an hour for him, and he was furious—he's got a terrible temper but he's the dearest old thing, really. Pretty soon Jimsy came wandering in with his arms full of books and games and puzzles and things he'd got to amuse himself while he was laid up! Of course the doctor expected him to keep perfectly still in bed, but he found he could make a sort of a raft of two table extension boards and slide downstairs to his meals. He had an awful time getting up again, but he didn't care. The first day he was laid up he had exactly nineteen people to see him, and he took the bandages off the leg and all the boys and teachers wrote their autographs and sentiments on the cast. He called it his Social Register and his Guest Book!" Honor was too happily deep in her reminiscences to see that her new friend was a little bored. He got suddenly to his feet. "Yes. He must be an unusual fellow. But I'd like to hear you sing. Won't you come into the house and sing something for me?" "All right," said Honor. "I love to sing, but I haven't studied very much yet, and I haven't any decent songs. Why doesn't somebody write some?—Songs about something? Not just maudling along about 'heart' and 'part' and that kind of stuff! Come on! There's Stepper at the piano now. He'll play for me." It was mellow in the long living-room after the brazen afternoon sun outside, a livable, lovable room. Stephen Lorimer had an open book on the music rack and he was thumping some rather stirring chords. "Stepper," said Honor, "here's Carter Van Meter, and he wants me to sing for him, and I was just saying how I hated all [Pg 37] [Pg 38] [Pg 39] [Pg 40] [Pg 41] these mushy old songs. Can't you find me something different?" "I have," said her stepfather. "I've got the words here and I'm messing about for some music to go with them." Honor looked out as she passed the window on her way to the piano. "Wait a minute! Here's Jimsy! I'll call him!" She sped to the door and hailed him, and he came swiftly in. "Hello! How was practice?" "Fair. Burke was better. Tried him on the end. 'Lo, Mr. Lorimer. 'Lo, Carter!" "I've got a poem here you'll all like," said Stephen Lorimer. "No, you needn't shuffle your feet, Jimsy. It's your kind. Sit down, all of you. I'll read it." "So long as it hasn't got any 'whate'ers' and yestereves' and 'beauteous,'" the last King grinned. "Shoot!" "It's an English thing, by Henry Newbolt,—about cricket, but that doesn't matter. It's the thing itself. I may not have the words exactly,—I read it over there, and copied it down in my diary, from memory." He looked at the boys and the girl; Honor was waiting eagerly, sure of anything he might bring her; Jimsy King, fresh from the sweating realities of the gridiron, was good-humoredly tolerant; Carter Van Meter was courteously attentive, with his oddly mature air of social poise. He began to read, to recite, rather, his eyes on their faces: There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night, Ten to make and the match to win; A bumping pitch and a blinding light, An hour to play and the last man in, And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat Or the selfish hope of a season's fame, But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote— Play up! Play up! and—Play the Game! Jimsy King, who was lolling on the couch, sat up, his eyes kindling. "Gee...." he b...