Hervey Willetts

The Sentence

Even the powers that be at Temple Camp were considerate of Hervey. They did not dismiss him as they might have done after any one of his unruly escapades. They bided their time, and as the season approached its end they became the more lenient. There was something ominous about their leniency; a kind of grimness about the way Mr. Benson greeted our hero upon his return after an all night absence. “Well, my boy, did you have a good time?” he asked with portentous cordiality.

Hervey was too guileless to read the handwriting on the wall. Another boy, conscious of his own delinquencies, would have recognized this sudden immunity from reprimand as too good to be true. But Hervey accepted it as in the natural order of things. He had never resented reprimands; he had ignored and forgotten them. He bore nobody any malice, not even the trustees. He went upon his way rejoicing. If he had any thought about the management at all, it was probably that it had at last come round to his own way of thinking. But probably he had no thought about these things at all.

Then came the end of the season with its boat races and swimming matches and distribution of awards. Against the background of these honors and festivities, Hervey seemed a lonely figure. But he was not lonely. It was his fate to arouse much sympathy which he neither deserved nor desired. There was really nothing pathetic about his being an outsider at camp. It was the camp that was the outsider, not Hervey.

Yet there was a certain pity expressed for him when little Harold Titus, the tenderfoot office boy from Administration Shack, came running down to the diving board where Hervey had condescended to grace a loitering group with his presence. These idle, bantering groups bespoke the closing of the season; they were significant of diminishing numbers and the end of pleasurable routine.

“You’re wanted in the office, Hervey Willetts,” Harold panted. “You got to go up there right away.” Perhaps the breathless little tenderfoot felt a certain pride of triumph that he had been able to locate Hervey at all; it was a sort of scout stunt. Significant glances passed between the loiterers as Hervey departed.

He ambled in that way he had made familiar to all toward the somewhat pretentious rustic bungalow where the business of Temple Camp was conducted. He seemed never to proceed with any purpose; there was something delightfully casual about him. He was a natural born explorer. A secreted, chirping cricket could detain him, and on this occasion he paused and accommodatingly laid his trusty stick against the ground so that an aimless caterpillar might ascend it.

The small tenderfoot glanced back, aghast at Hervey’s leisurely progress toward his doom. “You better hurry up, it’s serious,” he called. And, imbued with a sense of his responsibility, he waited while our hero shot the caterpillar up into the foliage by a dextrous snap of his stick.

His ambling progress bringing him to Administration Shack, Hervey conceived the novel idea of ascending the steps on one leg. The tenderfoot messenger was appalled by the delay and by Hervey’s thus casually pulling a stunt at the very portal of the holy sanctum.

There being several steps, Hervey found his bizarre ascent difficult, but his resolution increased with repeated failures. He often made use of a couplet which had detained him many times and interfered with the camp schedule:

Start a stunt and then get stuck, Twenty days you’ll have bad luck.

He was so engrossed with this present acrobatic enterprise (to the unspeakable dismay of the little boy who had summoned him) that he did not at first perceive Councilor Wainwright standing in the doorway smiling down upon him. Indeed he was not aware of the councilor until, triumphant, he hopped breathless into the official’s very arms. The tenderfoot was appalled.

“Well, you succeeded, Hervey?” Mr. Wainwright commented pleasantly. “Suppose we step inside. I see you never give up.”

“When I start to do a thing, I do it,” said Hervey.

“Only sometimes you start to do the wrong things,” the councilor commented sociably. “Well, Hervey,” he added, dropping into a chair and inviting the boy to do the same, “here we are at the end of the season. How many rules do you suppose you’ve broken, Hervey?”

“I don’t like a lot of those rules,” said Hervey.

“No, I know you don’t,” laughed Mr. Wainwright, “but you see this isn’t your camp. If you want to have rules of your own you ought to have a camp of your own.”

“That’s true, too,” said Hervey.

“You see, Hervey, the trouble is you don’t seem to fit. You’re not bad; I never heard of you doing anything very bad. But you don’t seem to work in harness. You’re pretty hard to handle.”

“You don’t have to handle me, because I’m not around so much,” said Hervey.

“Well, now, my boy,” Mr. Wainwright pursued in a way of coming to the point, “of course, this kind of thing can’t go on. There have been a dozen occasions this season when you might have been--when you ought to have been summarily expelled. That this wasn’t done speaks well for your disposition. It’s surprising how well you are liked by those who seldom see you. I suppose it’s what you might call the triumph of personality.”

Here was a glowing truth. And because it was true, because he really did have a certain elusive charm, Hervey seemed baffled at this declaration of his own quaint attractiveness. He did not know what a hard job poor Mr. Wainwright was having trying to pronounce sentence.

“A fellow wanted to hike to Westboro with me yesterday,” said Hervey, “but I told him he’d better ask the keepers; I wouldn’t get any fellow in trouble--nix on that.”

“But you got yourself in trouble.”

“That’s different,” said Hervey.

“Thank you. Now, Hervey, we’ve been talking over your case for some time and it was lately decided that since the end of the season was close at hand there was no need of putting on you the stigma of dismissal. Tom Slade was responsible for that decision; he seems to like you.”

“He knows I wouldn’t take a dare from anybody,” said Hervey; “I don’t care what it is.”

“Hmph; well, he seems to like you. So you’re going home Saturday just like all the other boys. You will have finished the season. No disgrace. I don’t know whether you have any regrets or not. You have been a great trial to the management. We who have the camp in charge feel that we can’t again take the responsibility which your presence here entails. If you were with a troop and scoutmaster perhaps it would be different; perhaps you would have made a better showing under such influence. But you are a born free lance, if you know what that is, and this camp is no place for free lances, however picturesque they may be.”