PALM SUNDAY
55
English. Why my allegory should have been titled in French I do
not know, but it seemed better that way.
These, then, are the things which occupied me, not only, like
Ted, after school, but all day long too in the class-room: a never–
ending daydream that made me deficient in my studies, a stranger
to my classmates, a nuisance to my mother, and forever restless
and dissatisfied with myself.
"Tell them about the sail, Snitch," said Ted's father.
"They don't want to hear about it."
"Of course we want to hear about it," I said.
"Snitch fooled me
that
time, didn't you Snitch. He certainly
put me in
my
place, all right. Tell them about it, Snitch."
"There isn't anything to tell."
"Oh yes there is·. You just don't want to show up your old
man, do you Snitch. I know you." Ted's father laughed. "Anyway,
he said he could carry forty yards of sailcloth-"
''Thirty-six," said Ted.
"Well, thirty-six, and I told him he was crazy. So who was
right? So Snitch was. As usual.
If
you don't tell them 'about it,
Snitch, I will. I'm not ashamed."
We stood around listening to Ted's father kidding him and
then gradually I became aware of music playing somewhere, an
organ, and it seemed several. minutes before I realized that it was
a radio in the house upstairs. Nobody was paying any attention to
it but I was, because I now heard the chorus or choir and they were
singing "The Palms," a song we used to sing
in
church on Palm
Sunday years ago when I was a child, and then with a sudden
unaccountable misgiving I remembered that today was Palm Sun–
day. It is actually true that my heart beat just a little faster for
several minutes when I first heard that music; but when I remem–
bered why, and reminded myself that I had long since overcome
my feeling about Palm Sunday and that song, I was all right again
and able to go on listening to the conversation here about me in
the cellar.
"Of course you'd have to see the sail to appreciate the story,"
Ted's father was saying; "It's a dandy, all right, but thirty-six yards
-why, he'd never be able to carry it in the wide world, his mother
and I told him. And !hen of course when it came to a show-down,
Snitch made us out a couple of ignoramuses like he always does,
