His strategy, he well knew, fitted in nicely with Arthur Francis Ferris’s cautious, slow-moving plan to admit a few boys who were not quite the usual type of St. Bartholomew student. Ferris had accepted one boy from Chicago and one from Buffalo, in his hesitant program against what he called inbreeding; and while not committing the school to an acceptance of Penrose Lockwood, he took the older brother George. He had already satisfied himself that the financial present and future of the Lockwood family was safe, and any misgivings he may have had in regard to Abraham Lockwood were put at rest by Joe Calthorp and Gabriel Bromley, who assured him that Lockwood was being over-modest in his social and business attainments. Joe Calthorp, who had not been a member of The Ruffes, mentioned that organization to Ferris, and Ferris noticed approvingly that Abraham Lockwood never brought it up. Bromley reported to Ferris that Lockwood and father had built the Lutheran church in their home town, and here again Lockwood had been silent.
Abraham Lockwood, to be sure, had had the advantage of knowing that Arthur Francis Ferris had a Concern of his own—St. Bartholomew’s School.
And so, in the autumn of ‘87, those old friends Morris Homestead, Harry Penn Downs, and Abraham Lockwood were together again on a sleeping car to Boston. The Homestead and Downs boys, meeting the Lockwood boy for the first time, drew closer together in blank hostility to the stranger, to the embarrassment of the three fathers. It was the first setback for Abraham Lockwood’s Concern as well as the first time he had ever felt the rush of love and protective hatred that a parent experiences when his child is abused. For his son’s stupid cruelty Harry Penn Downs was to pay with his life.
But in spite of the inauspicious beginning of his boarding-school career, George Lockwood was a delight to the Rector. The boy went rapidly into the lead in first-year algebra and Latin, and he was one of the best foot-racers in his class. His room was orderly, he kept his person clean, and his early homesickness lasted only until the masters gave public recognition to his excellence in his studies. Arthur Francis Ferris congratulated himself on his judgment; in spite of his misgivings about the boy’s father, Arthur Francis Ferris had allowed the good of the program to prevail over prejudice, and his instinct was proving sound.
Every boy at St. Bartholomew’s was given—for fifty cents, chargeable to his bill for books and incidentals—a small wooden box, 4” deep by 12” wide by 16” long. The box had a hasp, and for an additional fifteen cents the boy was given a padlock and two keys. He retained one key, and the other key was held by the head prefect. But the privacy of the box was respected. No boy was supposed to open another boy’s box, and no master was supposed to open the box without the boy’s permission.
Every boy kept his own special treasures in his box: letters, penknives, candy (forbidden), extra collar and cuff buttons, shoelaces, family photographs, horse chestnuts, Indian arrowheads, medals for scholastic and athletic accomplishment, journal-diaries, watches and watch fobs, stamps, money (forbidden), locks of girls’ hair, Sunday neckties. The boys had learned from handed-down information that the boxes were sometimes opened, in their absence, by masters in search of suspected pipes and tobacco and dirty pictures. Although candy and money were forbidden, punishment was not meted out for their possession; the illusion was maintained that the boxes were not opened by masters, and small sums of money—under a dollar—and bits of taffy were not considered serious contraband. Every boy had his own special hiding place for his key; some kept it around their necks on a string. And it was not considered bad form for a boy to go off by himself with his box rather than allow his roommates to see the contents; on the other hand, it was considered a fighting offense and violation of the boys’ own code for one boy to force open another boy’s box. Most boys had special places for their boxes, and a boy returning to his room would know immediately that the location of the box had been changed. “Who moved my box?” he would demand, and the question was the next thing to an outright accusation, was in itself often enough to touch off an argument that would lead to a fight. The supreme compliment was for one boy to show a friend the souvenirs and trinkets in his box, but two boys could be the best of friends all through school years without such a gesture. A boy carved or burned his name in the lid of his box, and even when he had nothing very interesting to disclose, the box was still his, private and secret and precious. Since there were no locks on any of the dormitory doors, a boy’s box and the moments he had alone with it provided the only one way—short of a solitary walk around the pond—to get away from his schoolmates and the masters. A boy who opened another boy’s box risked not only a fight with the offended one but a beating by the offended one’s friends.
Originally intended as a container for such articles as shoe blacking and brushes, hair combs, handkerchiefs and such necessary items and possessions, the box was a St. Bartholomew’s institution and tradition, and graduates of the school always took their boxes home with them, sometimes to use them all through college; and already there were boys at St. Bartholomew’s who were using boxes originally owned by their fathers. Boys like Francis Homestead and Sterling Downs, sure enough of themselves on their own ground, got a quick lesson in humility by being reminded that they had new boxes, not their fathers’.
The contents—and sometimes the emptiness—of a boy’s box were always examined with self-consciously penetrating care by the masters, especially by the newer, younger masters, who were readers of Arthur Conan Doyle. They could not, however, be present when a boy opened his box privately, in a far corner of the study-hall, when the boy, out of the needs of loneliness and unhappiness, would select one or two items to look at and fondle, rejecting all the rest. Nor could they know that some boys never reached that point where the box and its contents were preferable to human company. Some boys used their boxes just to keep things in.
George Bingham Lockwood’s box, which had G. B. Lockwood burned in the lid by a poker from the common-room fireplace, may have been unique. Instead of being a catch-all, with numerous unrelated items in a scramble, it had four compartments, each containing its own more or less homogeneous articles. George had had slots cut in the inner lengthwise sides of the box to hold three little fences that made the four compartments. His silver watch-and-chain, collar and cuff buttons and safety pins were in one compartment; his handkerchiefs and neckties in another; his money and postage stamps in a third; his letters from home and his soap and eau de Cologne in the fourth. Except for the separating panels the box and its contents offered no strikingly unusual reward to the snooping masters. A few silver and copper pieces were the only contraband, and a curious master would close the box in short order.