Nelson P--

I HAVE a waste-basket of green leather adorned with writhing green poppies in repoussé. It is columnar in form, like a drain-pipe, and so admirably constructed that it has survived the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune without perceptible detriment, except a slight sagging in the basal angle. A dissertation on waste-baskets in general, their forms, economy, symbolism, would be stimulating; it would be interesting to speculate upon the quantity of literature of the first rank, but now lost to a bereaved public, which time out of mind has been fed to these voracious craws, only in turn to be cast forth periodically into the oblivion of the rubbish barrel. But such moralizings would lead us too far afield. My basket, too, has been well fed, yet out of it, as from the Arabian bottle, rise no accusatory shades, but only the chubby semblance of one who on a summer afternoon, years ago, diffidently presented it to me as a unique token of his regard.

His name was Nelson P—. I have not asked his permission thus to make him and his waste-basket known to the world. He may never know. If he does he will forgive.

One morning I found myself—a badgered teacher in boarding-school — seated at the head of a long table at which were also eleven boys. P—sat facing me at the other end. I saw only his round face and square shoulders above the board, but something in the smile with which he regarded me seemed to indicate that he recognized a victim.

He was twelve, and I was twenty-four; I had seen much of boys, and he had seen much of teachers; neither of us was likely to be misled concerning the other. I knew from the first that P — worshiped the Goddess of Mischief. What he thought of me I shall not venture to imagine.

He began by disappearing under the table. A strange upheaval of the middle leaf proclaimed his whereabouts. In time he was kicked out by the other boys, and bobbed up in his place still smiling blandly. He then proceeded to drink a glass of water without using his hands. This is a feat requiring skill and he was not very skillful. He ended by upsetting the tumbler on the tablecloth. I remonstrated, and his smile became broader.

By this time the Headmaster was looking our way as P—had intended he should, and so P—was naturally gratified. He watched his time, stole a baked apple from one of his mates, and nearly strangled himself trying to swallow it before he was detected. When at last he began a performance in legerdemain with his pancakes, I sent him from the room. His exit was not characterized by an appearance of profound humiliation.

At the next meal, I gently detained him as he was passing to his place and seated him beside me. He was impressed. The repast was marked by a preternatural calm. I recall only two incidents in which he figured.

Thinking to win his confidence by a show of friendship, I asked him if he was named after the famous English admiral.

He regarded me with pity. ‘No,’ said he, ‘I was named after Battling Nelson.’ Having fired this shot, he continued his meal with a chastened air until near the end, when he looked up at me and said sadly, ‘Say, Mr. Soand-so, I feel as if somebody’d just died.’

Having myself felt more than once the depression of spirit which is the fruit of extreme virtue, I laughed sympathetically, and immediately we were friends.

That evening I paid him what may be termed my dinner-call. I found him sitting in his pyjamas on the foot of his bed, half buried in pillows, studying the geography of Farther India. Facing him at the head of the little iron cot sat his room-mate, Smitty. Smitty soon proved to be a character. He had a moon face, in the middle of which was a little globular nose, flanked by two round, grave, gray eyes. Smitty seldom smiled and then, —

He spoke with a crisp cold intonation, and aired carefully-weighed opinions in supernaturally perfect English with the manner of a sexagenarian. Such words as he used, and such maxims proceeding thus out of the mouth of a babe, filled me with endless pleasure and surprise. In Smitty’s presence the young animal, P—, reminded one of a bull puppy listening wide-eyed to the preachings of a twelve-year-old Saint Francis.

For Smitty’s knowledge was no more remarkable than P—’s ignorance. It is a common delusion of teachers that a well-informed boy deserves more credit than one who is wholly uninformed. The absorption of bookish knowledge is as natural to some boys as the absorption of apples or jam, while to others it is as unnatural as the absorption of eupatorium or senna tea. P— belonged to the latter class. Gifted with a serviceable enough head-piece, he had sedulously avoided burdening it with erudition derived from antiquity, preferring the pragmatic wisdom of how ‘ to chase the rolling circle’s speed and urge the flying bail.’ If generals have achieved fame by avoiding battle, surely he deserved some congratulation for having retained immunity from inoculation with the virus of knowledge so obstreperously urged upon him throughout his life at home and in school. If, to quote Bacon, there is a superstition in avoiding superstition, may not considerable knowledge be demanded to avoid acquiring knowledge? P—’s skill in the art of remaining ignorant certainly seemed to indicate a spark of genius.

Of course, Smitty was a phenomenon of endless perplexity to him as he was to Smitty. Yet, compelled by an inscrutable providence to room together, they made shift to get along. For even Smitty could unbend. When they were not studying or exercising or drilling, they put their heads together to enliven the monotony of the hall; and here Smitty’s brain and P—’s hand proved to be a formidable combination. They counted that day unprofitable which saw no new disturbance. The pursuit of mischief is as great a leveler as common peril, and there is no telling where their antics might have ended had not a new influence come into P—’s life.

But I am anticipating. When I left t hem that evening, we were on the best of terms, and from that time for some reason P— haunted me; I became his oracle.

Not long after this I was reading in my room when a diffident knock announced him. Outside in the hall he stood, transfigured in a brand-new uniform of gray-blue, the embroidered bugle of the field-music on his arm, the tubular insignia of manhood, creased to a razor-edge, on his legs. He was proud, but carried his honors with becoming modesty. I saw that his heart yearned for approbation, and gravely complimented him on his rank, his bearing, his trousers, until the conscious red mounted to the roots of his tow hair. He sat painfully on the edge of a chair while I instructed him in the art of preservation of long trousers: how to pull them up to keep them from bagging, how to press them under the mattress at night, how to fold and hang them when they were not in use. He listened gratefully and, as the sequel showed, registered my remarks indelibly on the tablets of his brain.

It may be that this occult lore gave him a long-awaited advantage over Smitty, for from this time their positions were to an extent reversed. No longer did P7emdash;sit in rapt astonishment while Smitty discoursed. The latter still talked in his grave and reverent fashion, but no longer to votive ears. He became the under dog. Of what value was his knowledge of pyramids and Parthenon, of King Arthur and Hereward the Wake, of anthropophagi and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders, when his roommate, who had suddenly developed into a soldier with an ambitious eye on the position of first bugler, not only could talk learnedly of tactics and strategy and whistle every call in the manual of field-music, but moreover could criticize Dress and expound the recondite kabala of Clothes.

I continued to be the humble instrument in this transformation of P7emdash;.

Many a long evening he sat in my room, like Paul at the feet of Gamaliel, while I ransacked my fund of precarious knowledge for new facts which should help him retain his ascendancy over his disgruntled room-mate. Smitty affected to scoff, but the worm of envy gnawed his vitals. I soon found that being an oracle had its disadvantages, for while an oracle may at times be obscure, it must never hesitate. What I did not know — shall I confess it?—I made up, and verified at leisure. When, at the close of the year, P—received the prize awarded to the best soldier in the junior ranks, my breast swelled with pride almost as much as his.

That evening P— entered my room carrying a cylindrical package. From his. manner of carrying it, one might have thought it a keg of dynamite or a crate of custard pies. Silently he edged through the doorway, eyeing me furtively, a wan smile playing about his lips, his brow puckered with preoccupation. I waited curiously, sure that important developments were in the wind.

P—— shifted from one foot to the other, the fingers of his free hand picking at the braid stripe of his trouserleg. He was painfully embarrassed. Assuming my most ingratiating expression, I glanced hopefully at the package as containing the crux of the situation. He finally deposited his burden on the bed with a sigh of relief and turned to go. I caught a glimpse of Smitty outside in the hall, hovering and peeping. For a moment P—paused.

He was evidently conning a speech.

‘I thought maybe you’d like — ’ he began at last, but was cut short by a shrill cry from without.

‘Teacher’s pet! Teacher’s pet!' came Smitty’s voice, rising exultant on the wings of jealousy.

For an instant P—wavered as if to proceed. But it was too much. There was a noise of scampering feet in the hall, and, without a word, he darted from the room and disappeared hotly in pursuit.

As the reader has surmised, the package contained the waste-basket. I have often wondered what train of thought led P— to hit upon just this gift.

The mere absence of a waste-basket from a boarding-school room would scarcely be noticed by a boy who found the window the handiest chute for apple-cores and banana-skins. Moreover, to him for whom most knowledge was feigning, all study mere folly, the need of a receptacle for superannuated notes and cast-off manuscripts could hardly have occurred. I suspect that a laborious correspondence with his mother flowered in the repoussé green poppies. The hours of mouth-twisting and other facial contortion this cost him made me doubly grateful. I should like to own the letters. I more than once had to revise his epistles, and can bear witness that never did the King’s English endure worse maltreatment than at his hands. It may be that Mother was a sly humorist and, knowing her son’s literary originality, thought to supply me with the most appropriate repository for his compositions.

Is it dangerous to confess, at any rate, that P—’s waste-basket came soon to rank as a true labor-saving device to which were fed occasional themes, the correction of which had been deferred until their authors had forgotten their existence, and then, of course, deferred for all time? It has, in consequence, grown to be for me the symbol of the English teacher’s profession as the wicker waste-basket is of the editor’s. The especial advantage of the leather contrivance is that it is water-tight and so is proof against the absent-mindedness of the professor who inadvertently empties his washbasin into it.

P—, like an old comet, has swum out of my ken. I saw Smitty not long ago at a more than usually lugubrious performance of Hedda Gabler, which he pronounced in true old fashion to be ‘highly creditable and most interesting.’

The green leather waste-basket, as I have said, begins to show signs of age. Upon closer examination I find that its skin is furrowed by a wrinkle or two. Yet I never look at it without smile of reminiscence as P—’s bullet head and Smitty’s moon face,