“I hadn’t thought of it,” Junius said when he read it. “I guess you’ll have to go to school.”
“I don’t want to go,” said Robbie.
“I know. I don’t much want you to go, either. But we have laws. The law has a self-protective appendage called penalty. We have to balance the pleasure of breaking the law against the punishment. The Carthaginians punished even misfortune. If a general lost a battle through bad luck, he was executed. At present we punish people for accidents of birth and circumstance in much the same manner.”
In the ensuing discussion they forgot all about the letter. John Whiteside wrote a very curt note.
“Well, Robbie, I guess you’ll have to go,” said Junius, when he received it. “Of course they’ll teach you a great many useful things.”
“Why don’t you teach me?” Robbie pleaded.
“Oh, I can’t. You see I’ve forgotten the things they teach.”
“I don’t want to go at all. I don’t want to learn things.”
“I know you don’t, but I can’t see any other way out.” And so one morning Robbie trudged to school. He was clad in an ancient pair of overalls, out at the knees and seat, a blue shirt from which the collar was gone, and nothing else. His long hair hung over his grey eyes like the forelock of a range pony.
The children made a circle around him in the school yard and stared at him in silence. They had all heard of the poverty of the Maltbys and of Junius’ laziness. The boys looked forward to this moment when they could torture Robbie. Here was the time come; he stood in their circle, and they only stared at him. No one said, “Where’d you get them clothes,” or, “Look at his hair,” the way they had intended to. The children were puzzled by their failure to torment Robbie.
As for Robbie, he regarded the circle with serious eyes. He was not in the least frightened. “Don’t you play games?” he asked. “My father said you’d play games.”
And then the circle broke up with howls. “He doesn’t know any games.”—“Let’s teach him pewee.”—“No, nigger-baby.” “Listen! Listen! Prisoner’s base first.”—“He doesn’t know any games.”
And, although they didn’t know why, they thought it rather a fine thing not to know games. Robbie’s thin face was studious. “We’ll try pewee first,” he decided. He was clumsy at the new games, but his teachers did not hoot at him. Instead they quarreled for the privilege of showing him how to hold the pewee stick. There are several schools of technique in pewee. Robbie stood aside listening for a while, and at last chose his own instructor.
Robbie’s effect on the school was immediate. The older boys let him entirely alone, but the younger ones imitated him in everything, even tearing holes in the knees of their overalls. When they sat in the sun with their backs to the school wall, eating their lunches, Robbie told them about his father and about the sycamore tree. They listened intently and wished their fathers were lazy and gentle, too.
Sometimes a few of the boys, disobeying the orders of their parents, sneaked up to the Maltby place on a Saturday, Junius gravitated naturally to the sycamore limb, and, while they sat on both sides of him, he read Treasure Island to them, or described the Gallic wars or the battle of Trafalgar. In no time at all, Robbie, with the backing of his father, became the king of the school yard. This is demonstrated by the facts that he had no chum, that they gave him no nickname, and that he arbitrated all the disputes. So exalted was his station that no one even tried to fight with him.
Only gradually did Robbie come to realize that he was the leader of the younger boys of the school. Something self-possessed and mature about him made his companions turn to him for leadership. It wasn’t long before his was the voice which decided the game to be played. In baseball he was the umpire for the reason that no other boy could make a ruling without causing a riot. And while he played the games badly himself, questions of rules and ethics were invariably referred to him.
After a lengthy discussion with Junius and Jakob, Robbie invented two vastly popular games, one called Slinkey Coyote, a local version of Hare and Hounds, and the other named Broken Leg, a kind of glorified tag. For these two games he made rules as he needed them.
Miss Morgan’s interest was aroused by the little boy, for he was as much a surprise in the schoolroom as he was in the yard. He could read perfectly and used a man’s vocabulary, but he could not write. He was familiar with numbers, no matter how large, yet he refused to learn even the simplest arithmetic. Robbie learned to write with the greatest of difficulty. His hand wavered crazy letters on his school pad. At length Miss Morgan tried to help him.
“Take one thing and do it over and over until you get it perfectly,” she suggested. “Be very careful with each letter.”
Robbie searched his memory for something he liked. At length he wrote, “There is nothing so monsterous but we can belief it of ourselfs.” He loved that monsterous. It gave timbre and profundity to the thing. If there were words, which through their very sound-power could drag unwilling genii from the earth, “monsterous” was surely one of them. Over and over he wrote the sentence, putting the greatest of care and drawing on his “monsterous.” At the end of an hour, Miss Morgan came to see how he was getting on.
“Why, Robert, where in the world did you hear that?”
“It’s from Stevenson, ma’am. My father knows it by heart almost.”
Of course Miss Morgan had heard all the bad stories of Junius, and in spite of them had approved of him. But now she began to have a strong desire to meet him.
Games in the school yard were beginning to fall off in interest. Robbie lamented the tact to Junius one morning before he started off to school. Junius scratched his beard and thought. “Spy is a good game,” he said at last. “I remember I used to like Spy.”
“Who shall we spy on, though?”
“Oh, anyone. It doesn’t matter. We used to spy on Italians.”
Robbie ran off excitedly to school, and that afternoon, following a lengthy recourse to the school dictionary, he organized the B.A.S.S.F.E.A.J. Translated, which it never was above a whisper, this was the Boys’ Auxiliary Secret Service For Espionage Against The Japanese. If for no other reason, the very magnificence of the name of this organization would have made it a force to be reckoned with. One by one Robbie took the boys into the dim greenness under the school yard willow tree, and there swore them to secrecy with an oath so ferocious that it would have done credit to a lodge. Later, he brought the group together. Robbie explained to the boys that we would undoubtedly go to war with Japan some day.
“It behoofs us to be ready,” he said. “The more we can find out about the nefarious practices of this nefarious race, the more spy information we can give our country when war breaks out.”
The candidates succumbed before this glorious diction. They were appalled by the seriousness of a situation which required words like these. Since spying was now the business of the school, little Takashi Kato, who was in the third grade, didn’t spend a private moment from then on. If Takashi raised two fingers in school, Robbie glanced meaningly at one of the Boy Auxiliaries, and a second hand sprung frantically into the air. When Takashi walked home after school, at least five boys crept through the brush beside the road. Eventually, however, Mr. Kato, Takashi’s father, fired a shot into the dark one night, after seeing a white face looking in his window. Robbie reluctantly called the Auxiliary together and ordered that espionage be stopped at sundown. “They couldn’t do anything really important at night,” he explained.
In the long run Takashi did not suffer from the espionage practiced on him, for, since the Auxiliaries had to watch him, they could make no important excursions without taking him along. He found himself invited everywhere, because no one would consent to be left behind to watch him.
The Boy Auxiliaries received their death blow when Takashi, who had in some way learned of their existence, applied for admittance.
“I don’t see how we can let you in,” Robbie explained kindly. “You see you’re a Japanese, and we hate them.”
Takashi was almost in tears. “I was born here, the same as you,” he cried. “I’m just as good American as you, ain’t I?”
Robbie thought hard. He didn’t want to be cruel to Takashi. Then his brow cleared. “Say, do you speak Japanese?” he demanded.