City Boy (21 page)

On the other hand the Christian children who drifted into the Gauss fold were not ill at ease. The services were carefully designed. They included only those Psalms of David which have found place in both Jewish and Christian prayerbooks, and a few hymns praising the Almighty in very general terms. The sermons were five-minute speeches by various counselors on nature, camp spirit, or Indian lore. It all went swimmingly.

Two by two, the campers of Manitou marched through the gate in the hedge. They made a colorful procession, these boys all in white shirts and trousers, winding across the green lawn in the sunset. Herbie felt a pulse of excitement as his turn came to walk through the narrow passage to the forbidden ground, and the thrill increased as he saw the girls in another double line of white, far on the other side of the lawn. The girls' grounds were prettier than the precinct of his own sex, he perceived. On the brow of the hill the bunks stood in a semicircle amid a grove of pine trees, and the slope to the water's edge was all well-tended grass, with here and there a shade tree and rustic benches. It happened that the guest house where the parents stayed on weekends was at the top of this same hill, separated from the girls' bunks by an avenue of pine trees. Why not? It was only just, after all, that the parents who were paying for Camp Manitou should have the best possible view of it.

For religious services the banks of benches were moved close to each other. Uncle Sandy and Aunt Tillie may have thought there was less chance of flirting in such a solemn time, or that the counselors, undistracted by rockets, would be able to stem romance. In any case, the aisle between the boys and girls was three feet wide, instead of twenty.

Uncle Sid, perched at a battered brown upright piano on a small wheeled platform, struck up Handel's “Largo.” The lines of girls began to file into their places. Herbie watched for Lucille, and at last saw his light of love on the point of entering the benches. The line was broken and directed into a new row with Lucille in the lead, so that she found herself on the aisle near the boys' rows. Now the boys began filling the benches in the same manner. Herbie feverishly counted heads, calculated the number of boys necessary to fill all the places up to the precious spot opposite Lucille, and compared it to his position in line. Worse luck! He was six too far forward. Four of his bunkmates were behind him. Without explanation he shifted to the place back of them.

“Pssst, Ted.”

“Yeah, Herbie.”

“See that red-headed girl on the aisle there?”

“Yeah. Some pot.”

“Never mind that. I wanna sit next to her. When you go into the row in front spread out, huh? Spread out!”

Ted looked at him sideways, nodded, and whispered to the others. When the turn of Bunk Thirteen came to take places, they spread so effectively that the line was broken at Ted. The bunk captain threw Herbie a birdlike wink and marched triumphantly toward Lucille, who permitted herself a peep at the oncoming boy. Just short of the aisle Ted stopped, and Herbie slipped past him into the coveted seat. He had gained great riches. For a whole hour he would be sitting three feet from his girl.

“Hello, Lucille,” he whispered.

“Hi, Herbie,” came a soft reply.

“Hey, ain't this lucky?” said the boy, and was rewarded with a sweet, knowing smile that threw him into a transport.

The sunset was in full glory. Banks of reddened clouds suffused the air with a rosy hue, all the more visible because of a faint ground mist that caught the color. The moon and the evening star shone through the haze and cast parallel silver paths, one broad, one pencil-thin, on the quiet lake. The scents of pine and honeysuckle came and went with each stirring of the wind. For a while the two camps sat in silence while Uncle Sid played a melancholy, simple religious melody. Such was the setting that each note, even from the cheap, toneless piano and the heavy hand, seemed to gleam out like a new star.

Mr. Gauss rose, book in hand, and began reading, while the music played.

“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters—”

Herbie was suddenly overpowered by a terrible, wonderful new sensation—a tingling all over his body, a feeling of a mighty presence filling the sky and earth about him, and a hot gush of tears to his eyes. A hundred times he had heard these words read in this same voice in school assemblies: dry, meaningless sounds. All at once they seemed tremendous truths. He was in green pastures, beside still waters, with Lucille Glass three feet away, and it all seemed the doing of the Lord God himself, Who was so close that He might reach down and pat Herbie's head if He wished.

“He restoreth my soul—”

The words of the Psalm penetrated to the boy's heart and vibrated there. He looked around him, wondering if anybody else was caught in this miraculous feeling. Ted and Eddie were whispering together and grinning. Lucille, as soon as he glanced at her, turned her eyes to him with a slightly mischievous smile, then looked down at her fingers in her lap again. Nobody in all the rows seemed rapt. He was alone, evidently, in his exaltation.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil—”

Herbie closed his eyes. He saw, as clearly as he had been seeing the sunset, the Valley of the Shadow of Death. It was a gaunt, narrow plain covered with bones and broken stones, with straight black cliffs rising on either side as high as the sky, and only a faint greenish light everywhere. He was walking along the plain, which sloped steeply downward into increasing darkness, but he was not afraid.…

“Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me—”

A slender rod that came straight down into the valley from the sky was in his hand, pulling him gently forward, guiding his steps.…

Herbie opened his eyes and was actually startled to see the lake, the rows of children, and Mr. Gauss. It was like waking from a dream. The music stopped, and the camp owner hurried through the last lines of the Psalm, though Herbie could have begged him to go more slowly, perhaps for the first time since he had become familiar with Mr. Gauss's oratorical manner. Reluctantly he felt the magic fade. He tried to renew, to cling to the strange trance, but the world was looking more and more like itself again.

“Boys and girls,” said Mr. Gauss, “here we are again at dear old Camp Manitou. How nice it is to get away from the hot, dirty city and commune in the bosom of nature once more, by the side of our beautiful lake nestled amid the Berkshire Mountains.”

“At only three hundred bucks apiece,” whispered Ted, “payable in advance.”

Herbie covered his mouth and laughed. He glanced across at Lucille and boldly winked. For a moment she looked arch, then she winked back and chuckled quietly. Things were thoroughly normal again, and Herbie found himself glad of it.

The effect of the passing seizure was no more than a slight exhilaration that lasted the evening. Thinking back on the peculiar brief ecstasy, he decided that if it had gone on any longer it might have become painful, and certainly would have made him behave like a halfwit. With this conclusion he forgot about it. Nothing like it ever happened to him again that summer, for the services became a matter of routine like everything else, incapable of surprising or stirring him.

But Mr. Gauss, though he undoubtedly hadn't the least idea of what he was doing, had fulfilled one of his promises in the booklet. With a little help from David, King of Israel, he had effected in Herbie Bookbinder a tiny, temporary, but unmistakable religious improvement.

T
he summer wore on. It quickly became established that Lennie Krieger was one of the leading lights of the camp, and that Herbie Bookbinder was a negligible fellow. Every team that included Lennie was a mighty engine; the Ipanas, the Oldsmobiles, the John Barrymores, and the Palmolives each led their leagues. The Intermediates actually beat the Seniors at basketball, an event unheard of in Manitou records, and Lennie scored thirty of his team's thirty-six points. Within two weeks a new election was held in Bunk Thirteen, and Lennie added this captaincy to his other honors. It was soon agreed that as a citizen of Manitou, Lennie stood second in distinction only to the massive Super-senior Yishy Gabelson.

Herbie, on the other hand, was known as a dead loss. Among the Juniors he might have passed as a mediocre player, but as an Intermediate he was undersize, overweight, and slow as a snail. When he ran from one base to another, he appeared to his raging teammates to be wading through mud. When a basketball was thrown to him, it often as not knocked him down. In track meets his efforts to run and jump were not only comical but dangerous. His first try at the high jump brought down the bar and both its supporting poles in a heap, one of the poles hitting Uncle Sid on the head and stretching him on the ground. After a couple of weeks of such performances, he found himself a universal substitute on all teams. He seldom appeared on the field, but presumably was ready to relieve any boy who was injured or who dropped dead. The rate of accidents and fatalities being low, he took to wandering away from the fields as soon as games started, picking up a book somewhere, and spending the athletic period reading under a tree. He would have preferred not to bother with the hot hike out to the field, which was simply a waste of a good half hour, but the conscience of the counselor in charge usually balked at this. No, Herbie had to go through the rite of marching out to the baseball diamond or handball court. Once there, he would take the first exciting moment of the game as his cue to disappear quietly, and the Uncle in charge either didn't see him go or pretended that he didn't. This arrangement soon became a settled thing, and suited Herbie well enough. He would rather, of course, have been a hero like Lennie, but it was obvious to him that he was marked for obscurity.

His cousin Cliff was considered an ordinary boy, neither very very bad nor very good. A single shot-put in the first track meet was his main distinction. He had thrust the iron shot so far that the judges had measured the distance three times before announcing the result with wonder. But the excitement that sprang up around Cliff died quickly when it turned out that he was unable to do it again. Cliff was powerful but awkward, and only by chance could he co-ordinate his movements to put forth strength. Once in a baseball game a week later he astounded both teams by throwing the ball from deep left field to home plate. But again, he was unable to do it a second time. Casually, in the heat of a moment, Cliff could perform these incredible stunts, as Herbie knew. On the whole, he was regarded as a good-natured, quiet, second-rate camper.

He was so regarded, that is, until the coming of Clever Sam.

Horseback riding was one of the delights promised in the booklets. Although Herbie had never ridden a horse, the paragraph of Mr. Gauss's fine prose describing this kingly sport at Manitou had set him dreaming of gallops through forest and meadow, up mountainsides and across shallow streams, in company with other dashing horsemen resembling the extras in an English hunting movie. This vision had been deflated in a talk on the train with Ted. It had developed that the Gauss stables consisted of one ancient beast named Baby, who was so old and stiff that a ride on her resembled (so Ted said) walking on four stilts. The disillusionment went further when the boys arrived at camp and found the stable empty. Baby, it appeared, had died and been buried by the caretaker in May.

Once dead, Baby took on a new aspect in the memories of old campers like Ted. She had been, so they now maintained, a “swell” horse, a swift, gentle, yet fiery steed, the only good thing in the whole camp, and so forth. Dark rumors went around that Mr. Gauss had sold her. Three old campers swore that they had seen her, alive and full of fire, pulling a farmer's wagon in a near-by village. Now, this was a malicious untruth, for Baby was as dead as Julius Caesar, but the boys were ready to believe anything evil of Mr. Gauss. The murmuring reached Uncle Sandy's ears. At a parade-ground speech he first denounced the slanderers of “the Skipper” (nobody else ever referred to Mr. Gauss by any sobriquet but “Uncle Gussie,” but his official nickname, selected after an essay contest in the first year, was “the Skipper,” and Uncle Sandy was compelled to use it). Next, he proudly proclaimed that, disregarding expense, the Skipper had advertised for a horse in the local papers, so that the noble saddle sport would be restored to Camp Manitou in a day or two. He concluded by advising all slanderers and skeptics to consult the bulletin board of the camp, nailed to a pole at the foot of Company Street. With unconscious humor the entire camp crowded around the board as soon as the speech was over. There they saw this newspaper clipping from the Panksville
Observer:

WANTED—to purchase—one horse for riding purposes in children's camp. Must be gentle and inexpensive. Call 913-R, Mr. Gauss.

Thus the murmurers were mostly silenced, though one or two held to the theory that the advertisement was a Gauss trick to cover his tracks in the crime of selling the magnificent Baby. These die-hards—Ted was one of them—offered to bet “a million dollars” that no horse would ever be bought. But nobody appeared sufficiently interested in winning a million dollars and the controversy languished.

The very next morning, the injustice of such prejudices was proved, when Mr. Gauss bought a horse—under circumstances which are worth describing.

The camp owner was sitting in an easy chair on the veranda of the guest house, going over the kitchen accounts with the chef and wondering how much money he could save by eliminating the children's desserts at lunch time, when the handy man, a slow-talking, slow-moving young rustic named Elmer Bean shambled up the steps of the porch and announced, “Feller with a hoss at the gate, Mist' Gauss.”