“The Young Idea”
The alterations of feeling in that first dialogue
between Tom and Philip continued to make their intercourse
even after many weeks of schoolboy intimacy.
Tom never quite lost the feeling that Philip, being
the son of a “rascal,” was his natural
enemy; never thoroughly overcame his repulsion to
Philip’s deformity. He was a boy who adhered
tenaciously to impressions once received; as with all
minds in which mere perception predominates over thought
and emotion, the external remained to him rigidly
what it was in the first instance. But then it
was impossible not to like Philip’s company when
he was in a good humor; he could help one so well
in one’s Latin exercises, which Tom regarded
as a kind of puzzle that could only be found out by
a lucky chance; and he could tell such wonderful fighting
stories about Hal of the Wynd, for example, and other
heroes who were especial favorites with Tom, because
they laid about them with heavy strokes. He had
small opinion of Saladin, whose cimeter could cut a
cushion in two in an instant; who wanted to cut cushions?
That was a stupid story, and he didn’t care
to hear it again. But when Robert Bruce, on the
black pony, rose in his stirrups, and lifting his
good battle-axe, cracked at once the helmet and the
skull of the too hasty knight at Bannockburn, then
Tom felt all the exaltation of sympathy, and if he
had had a cocoanut at hand, he would have cracked it
at once with the poker. Philip in his happier
moods indulged Tom to the top of his bent, heightening
the crash and bang and fury of every fight with all
the artillery of epithets and similes at his command.
But he was not always in a good humor or happy mood.
The slight spurt of peevish susceptibility which had
escaped him in their first interview was a symptom
of a perpetually recurring mental ailment, half of
it nervous irritability, half of it the heart-bitterness
produced by the sense of his deformity. In these
fits of susceptibility every glance seemed to him
to be charged either with offensive pity or with ill-repressed
disgust; at the very least it was an indifferent glance,
and Philip felt indifference as a child of the south
feels the chill air of a northern spring. Poor
Tom’s blundering patronage when they were out
of doors together would sometimes make him turn upon
the well-meaning lad quite savagely; and his eyes,
usually sad and quiet, would flash with anything but
playful lightning. No wonder Tom retained his
suspicions of the humpback.
But Philip’s self-taught skill in drawing was
another link between them; for Tom found, to his disgust,
that his new drawing-master gave him no dogs and donkeys
to draw, but brooks and rustic bridges and ruins,
all with a general softness of black-lead surface,
indicating that nature, if anything, was rather satiny;
and as Tom’s feeling for the picturesque in
landscape was at present quite latent, it is not surprising
