CHAPTER V

YARDLEY HALL

It may be that you who are reading this story know Yardley Hall quite as well as, maybe even better than I do. If so you will think me a bit cheeky for describing it. But as this is likely to fall into the hands of those who may, at the most, have only heard the name of Yardley, I think we owe it to such to say a little about the scene of the story. But I’ll make it as brief as I can, for I don’t like descriptions any better than, possibly, you do. And if you are not satisfied with this, why, it’s the easiest thing in the world to skip this chapter. I shall think myself lucky if you don’t skip more than that before you have finished my tale.

Yardley Hall School, then, is at Wissining, Connecticut, and Wissining is a very little town--so little that some maps do not even show it--situated on Long Island Sound about midway between Newport and New Haven. A little river--not much more than a good-sized creek, to tell the truth--leaves the Sound there and meanders back through marsh and meadow until it finally loses all likeness to a river--even a little one--and becomes simply a bog. But that is seven or eight miles inland. At Wissining it makes quite a showing in a small way; it is broad enough to accommodate a couple of islands, and that is something, you’ll have to allow!

Coming from New York, and after you have left New Haven quite a distance behind, you reach Greenburg. Greenburg is on the west bank of the river and is something of a town. It has a good many factories of various sorts; factories for silverware, brass tubing, clocks and builder’s hardware. There are others beside, and a big boat-building yard where they turn out gasoline launches. Whenever you come across a launch whose engine bears the inscription, “Wissining Launch and Engine Company,” you may be certain that it came from Greenburg. Of course if you want to reach Wissining you pay no attention to the conductor’s cry of “Greenburg! Greenburg!” You keep your seat in the car and after a minute or two the train goes on, past the backs of the houses and stores and over a little bridge across the river, and stops at a very much less imposing station. That is Wissining.

If you stand on the platform after the train has gone and look about you the first thing you will probably notice is a mass of stone and brick buildings which stand on a plateau about a quarter of a mile away. You are looking now directly north-east. Between you and the collection of buildings, which, as the station master will tell you, is Yardley Hall School, there lies nothing but a field and a country road which starts off straight and level and very business-like only to waver uncertainly a little distance away and then make a long curve up a hill until it has reached the top of the plateau and is skirting the fronts of the big buildings.

The school buildings are arranged in such a way that they form in outline a letter J, the loop toward Greenburg and the straight part facing the Sound. Clarke Hall is at the top. Then comes Whitson. Then, forming the first curve, Oxford. Next is Merle and finally, supplying the final twirl, the Kingdon Gymnasium. Back of Whitson and Clarke, and having no part in the J, is Dudley Hall. This completes the list, save for a heating plant tucked away near the gymnasium, and the boat house on the river-bank.

If you stand on the steps of Oxford Hall you have a noble view before you. In the immediate foreground there is a wide lawn, known as The Prospect. Below and beyond are fields through which the road runs to the village, a modest collection of some thirty or forty houses and stores. Further beyond is the river, with the railroad bridge, the wagon bridge and Loon Island for points of interest. Across the river lies Greenburg, quite a city in appearance, her tall chimneys forever spouting smoke. To your right, looking along the front of Oxford, is field and wood, the river, and, beyond that, Meeker’s Marsh, a mile-wide territory of reeds and rushes, streams and islands, where there is good duck and plover and snipe shooting in season, or used to be. There is a good-sized pond there, too; Marsh Lake they call it; and if you have a canoe or a flat-bottomed boat and know the way you can reach it from the river. In the far distance are wooded hills and occasional farms.

Turning and facing the Sound you have in front of you a path which leads straight across The Prospect, past the flag-pole, until, at the edge of the plateau, it becomes a rustic bridge and crosses the railroad. That bridge is a favorite lounging place, for you can look right down into the funnels of the smoke-stacks as the engines whirr by beneath you; that is, if you don’t mind a little smoke. The bridge leads across the railroad cut and the path begins again, running down hill now and parting to left and right at the edge of the woods. If you go through the woods a few minutes’ walk will bring you to the beach with the broad Sound before you. But from The Prospect the Sound is well in view, for the woods and the village and the big Pennimore estate, which fronts the Sound and river both, are all below you. Almost due south those little specks of islands are The Plums. More to the east that purple smudge on the horizon is the eastern end of Long Island. I doubt if any school has a more wonderful outlook.

Yardley Hall School was founded in 1870 by Tobias Hewitt, M.A., Ph.D., Oxford. Then it was called Oxford School and there were only Oxford and Whitson Halls. For a quarter of a century the Doctor did well and the school flourished. But some fifteen years ago the Doctor met reverses and the property, forty acres of land, and, by that time, four buildings, passed into the hands of a stock company. The School was renamed and the business reorganized, the Doctor retaining a sufficient interest to give him an important voice in affairs. The new owners spent a good deal of money. A fine gymnasium was built, a new athletic field was laid out, the grounds were vastly improved, and, finally, in 1903 I think it was, Dudley Hall was erected. About the same time the buildings, all save Dudley, were connected with each other by covered colonnades, the gifts of graduates.

Of the buildings Oxford and Whitson are of granite, the former in Gothic style and the latter without claims to any. In Oxford the basement is given over to the chemical and physical laboratories and store rooms. On the first floor are recitation rooms, the school offices, and, at the eastern end, the Principal’s apartments. On the second floor are recitation rooms and the library. The Assembly Hall is on the third floor, as are the rooms of the rival debating societies, the Oxford and the Cambridge. Whitson contains the kitchens and commons downstairs and two floors of sleeping rooms above. Clarke is entirely a dormitory, one of the new brick and limestone buildings put up in 1892, Merle, erected in the same year, houses the students of the Preparatory Class, for at Yardley there are five classes, First, Second, Third, Fourth and Preparatory. It is in Merle that the Matron, Mrs. Ponder, has her office. (Mrs. Ponder is popularly known as “Emily,” but no disrespect is intended.) Dudley, the newest of the dormitories, is the best in point of comfort, although its situation is not especially desirable. In Dudley you can have a room all to yourself if you want it, or you can go in with another boy and have a suite of study and bedroom. The latter is the more popular way. Rooms in Dudley are awarded first to the members of the graduating class and then, if there are any left, to the Second Class boys.

Yardley is proud of its gymnasium, and justly so. When it was built, in 1895, it was the best preparatory school gymnasium in the country, and even to-day few, I think, excel it. The basement floor is given over to locker rooms, bath rooms and a commodious baseball cage. On the first floor is the gymnasium, Physical Director’s office and bowling alley. Above is the running track of twenty laps to the mile, the trophy room and the boxing room. Four hours a week of physical exercise in the gymnasium are required of all students save those engaged in active sports as members of school or class teams. Mr. Bendix, the Physical Director, is what the fellows call “a shark for work,” and there are those who would never utter a regret if Indian clubs, chest weights, dumb bells, single sticks, foils and boxing gloves suddenly disappeared from their ken. But such fellows form a minority of the whole, you may be sure.

If you take the path that leads down the slope toward the river from the gymnasium you will see Yardley Field spread before you; six acres of smooth ground leading with an imperceptible slope toward the river. First come the gravel tennis courts an even dozen of them in the two wire-netted enclosures. [The little red shed is where the nets are stored.] Then you find yourself at the back of the grand stand, which, built in sections of steel frame and wooden seats, can be moved as desired from one part of the grounds to another. The track is a quarter of a mile oval of hard, well-rolled cinders enclosing the gridiron and diamond. If you skirt the track to the left you reach the boat-house, a picturesque little building of weather-stained shingles about which ivy and shrubbery grow.

Now follow the well-worn path along the river to the right until you have reached the other end of the oval. That low expanse of grass and rushes up-stream there, is Flat Island. It’s a joyous loafing place in Spring before the mosquitoes begin business. To the right is the golf links and in front of you is the Third Hole. There are only nine of them and the course doubles back and forth perplexingly for the newcomer. But it’s a pretty good course for all of that. The first tee is up there on the hill, a little way back of the gymnasium and on the edge of the woods; and there is a school legend to the effect that once an “Old Boy,” visiting his son at Yardley, stood up there and drove the ball clean into the river. And--well, I have nothing to say; you can see the distance yourself. But I know that I wouldn’t like to have to do it!

There’s a story at Yardley which tells how Doctor Tobias Hewitt, when he came to this country from England to start a school, had, because of his Oxford predilections, intended settling on the Thames River, and how when he arrived there was a dense fog blowing in from the Sound and he made a mistake in the rivers and didn’t discover his error until it was too late. Then, so the story goes, he tried to have the Wissining called the Thames and the Thames the Wissining; but the State of Connecticut wouldn’t humor him. Of course the story was made up only to illustrate the Doctor’s fondness for things English and, more especially, Oxonian. And true it is that during the early days of the school English customs were followed very closely. The Doctor was Head Master then, the instructors were Masters, the classes were “forms” and the dining hall was the “commons.” It is said that the Doctor even tried to install the “fag” system among the boys and that it went well enough until an unsympathetic youth from the free and enlightened West mutinied. The effects of his mutiny were: item, a disfigured nose for the boy whose fag he was supposed to be, and item, an immediate declaration of independence from all other fags resulting in a death-blow to the system. But all this was thirty years ago and more, and to-day both Doctor Hewitt and his school are American to the backbone, the Doctor rampantly so on occasions. To be sure, Oxford Hall still holds its name and the dining hall is still known as commons; the rival debating clubs clung to their original titles and the school color had never been changed from dark blue. But these things merely served to prove the school’s emancipation from the British yoke; and, as for the school color, Yardley fellows will wither you with a glance if you suggest any similarity in hue between it and the Oxford’s color, informing you crushingly that it is “Yale blue.” Which, as Yardley sends more students to Yale than to any other college, is as it should be.