WORLD'S END

Lanny drove up to Sand Hill, where St. Thomas's Academy is situated, and took his examinations with success. The fact that the name of Budd was signed to all his papers was not supposed to have anything to do with his passing; nor the fact that one of the school's largest brownstone buildings had been paid for out of the profits which Budd Gunmakers had derived from the American Civil War, and another from the profits of the Spanish-American War. St. Thomas's was a part of the Budd tradition; and the family's right to send its sons there was hereditary. Lanny asked his father about the matter of his not being quite properly a Budd, and Robbie said he had entered him as his son, and that was that; it wasn't the custom to send over to France for marriage certificates.

The beautiful old buildings stood in a park having lawns and shade trees like an English estate. They were of dull old red brick with Boston ivy on the walls, making a safe home for millions of spiders and bugs. In one of the dormitories Lanny shared a comfortable room and bath with a cousin whom he had met on the tennis courts, but with whom he had little else in common.

Lanny had played with boys, but always a few at a time; he had never before been part of a horde. He discovered that a horde is something different, a being with a personality of its own. Being young and eager, he was curious about it, and every hour was a fresh adventure. He awoke to the ringing of an electric bell, went to breakfast to another ringing, and thereafter moved through the day as an electrically controlled robot. He acquired knowledge in weighed and measured portions; memorized facts and recited them, forgot many of them until the end of the month, relearned them for a "test," forgot them again until the end of a term, relearned them once more for "exam" - and then forgot them forever and ever, amen.

In addition to this part of his life, scheduled and ordained by the school authorities, the horde had its own life which it lived during off hours. This life centered upon three things: athletic prowess, class politics, and sex. If you could run, jump, or play football or baseball, your success was probable; if you could talk realistically about girls, that would help; if your family was notably rich and famous, and if you had Anglo-Saxon features, good clothes, and easy manners, all problems were solved. Entering the third year, Lanny was jumping into the midst of school politics, and had to be looked over and judged quickly. His cousin, belonging to a fashionable set, was ready to initiate him, and would be provoked if Lanny didn't display proper respect for the fine points upon which his friends based their judgments. "Be careful, or they'll set you down for a 'queerie,' " said this mentor.

VI

Robbie had asked Lanny not to play football, saying that he was too lightly built for this rough game. It was another of those cases in which the father expected him to be wiser than himself. Robbie didn't want Lanny to smoke or drink. He was willing for him to have a girl now and then, but wanted him to be "choosy" about it. He had wished Lanny to attend his grandfather's Bible class and his stepmother's church - even though Robbie himself wouldn't do it, and paid a price for refusing. All this was hard to fathom.

As it happened, Lanny could run, and liked to, and he was a good tennis player, so he would never be entirely a "queerie." But he had many handicaps to success at St. Thomas's. He had just come from abroad, and that made him an object of curiosity. He pronounced French correctly, which could only be taken as an affectation. He had read a great many books, and his masters discovered this fact and brought it out in class, hoping to waken a desire for culture in these "young barbarians all at play." That was hard on Lanny.

His first disillusionment came with the discovery that class sessions at St. Thomas's were rather dull. They consisted mainly of the recitation of lessons studied the night before, and if you had studied well, you were bored listening to other fellows who had studied badly, and you were only mildly entertained by their efforts to "get by" with a wisecrack. Rarely was there any intelligent discussion in class; rarely anything taught about which either masters or pupils were deeply concerned. They were preparing for college, and all instruction was aimed like a gun at a target; they learned names, dates, theorems, verb forms, rules, and exceptions - everything definite and specific, that could be measured and counted.