MR. ALSOP’s DIGNITY
“I’m awfully sorry!” began Mulcahy, vehemently, as soon as the door had
closed behind the departing form of Mr. Alsop. “I’m awfully sorry, but
I couldn’t help it. There wasn’t any other way out.”
“I suppose not,” answered Archer, with sullen sarcasm.
Mulcahy came round the table and put his hand on Archer’s shoulder. Sam
threw it off and edged away.
“Just try to think of it from my side,” urged Mulcahy. “Here I was,
caught in the act. If Alsop had wanted to make a row about it, I might
have lost my scholarship. They’d all have been down on me, anyway, and
it would have been terribly hard to get them over to my side again;
while as for you--” He hesitated at this point, not sure how to put
his idea into unobjectionable form.
“While as for me,” flamed Archer, “all I get is to have Alsop tell all
the rest that I’m a liar and going to the bad as fast as I can. That’s
nothing at all!”
“You’re crazy!” answered Mulcahy, smiling compassionately at his
companion’s vehemence. “Nothing like that will happen. You’ve a right
to smoke if you want to. Alsop understands that. I smoothed out all the
difficulty about your telling him that you didn’t. You won’t hear from
it again. Alsop won’t think any differently of you from what he always
has.”
“No different, but more so,” interjected Sam, bitterly.
“While as for me, why, my whole life plans might be spoiled.”
“_My_ life plans don’t make any difference, do they?”
“You haven’t any. You don’t need to have any. A fellow in your
position, with all the bills paid for you, and everything provided for
years to come, doesn’t know what it is to have to struggle along with
your head just above water, always afraid a big wave will roll up and
swamp you.”
“Why didn’t you think of that when you lighted the cigarettes?”
demanded Sam, roughly. “What business have you to smoke at all? You
know the rules.”
“The rules are silly for a man of my age,” returned Mulcahy. “If I’d
known Alsop was going to butt in, of course I wouldn’t have done it.”
“It’s done now, anyway,” sighed Archer, looking at his watch. “I don’t
know about you, but I’ve got to do some studying to-night. I can’t let
Alsop flunk me to-morrow, after this.”
“I’m going,” said the visitor. He held out his hand with his best, most
flattering smile. “Good-by, Sammy. You showed yourself the right sort
of a friend to-night. I shan’t forget it.”
“Nor I,” thought Sam, as he gave back a feeble pressure and muttered a
return good-night.
When Mulcahy was gone, Sam sat down by the lamp with his books spread
out before him. For a long time, however, he let his eyes stray past
them to the shaded corner of the room, while with tight-pressed
lips and wrinkled brow he considered his experiences since he came
to Seaton, and pronounced himself a fool. He had not been a fool in
every respect, it was true; he hadn’t been fresh, or boastful about
himself, and he had not done things flagrantly wrong, but he saw
clearly that many of his judgments had been mistaken. Strangely enough,
the irritating incident of the evening did not so greatly depress him.
He felt a certain satisfaction in the superiority of his behavior as
compared with Mulcahy’s, which served to offset the uneasiness caused
by the teacher’s error. But he did wish that he hadn’t committed
himself so far to intimacy with Mulcahy, and he regretted that he had
invited him home for Sunday.
In the distractions of the evening, Sam overlooked one part of the
French lesson for the next day. Mr. Alsop had given notice of a test
on vocabulary, a comparatively easy matter to prepare if he had only
remembered to study it. He was unpleasantly reminded of this omission
at the recitation next morning, when Mr. Alsop announced that all those
who failed to write correctly the English equivalents of twenty of
the twenty-five French words on the paper, must come to a “make-up”
on Saturday at five. Sam had forgotten to study his vocabulary. He
struggled over the list, and succeeded in getting but eighteen of the
twenty-five. On Saturday morning Mr. Alsop read his name among those
doomed to the five-o’clock make-up.
To be present at five o’clock on Saturday meant a late train home and
the evening spoiled. Sam had secured out-of-town permission from the
office, and had arranged to escort his mother to a meeting of his old
school athletic association in the evening. It seemed hard--unjust--to
be cut off from this prearranged visit, in order to take an exercise
which involved hardly five minutes and could be as well taken at some
other time. So the boy, having fretted and reviled for an hour, called
at Mr. Alsop’s room, and after explaining that the make-up would
prevent his going home, offered to take it in the instructor’s room
immediately after his return.
“I don’t see why you should have a privilege which the others have not;
and I don’t see why I should sacrifice my time to save a student from
the results of his own neglect,” said Mr. Alsop, tartly. Like many
a serious but narrow-minded pedagogue, he was taking the wholesale
failure of the class as a personal affront. He felt his dignity struck
at almost as if the boys had deliberately refused to learn. To Sam
Archer, moreover, he owed no favor.
“It’s a slight matter,” pleaded Sam, foolishly, “and it’s going to keep
me from going home. I got permission from the office three days ago.”
“It is _not_ a slight matter,” declared Mr. Alsop, sharply. “I beg to
differ with you. Neglect of work is never a slight matter. Permissions
from the office are always provisional. You will come with the rest. I
have no extra time to give you.”
Sam withdrew, crestfallen and indignant. He understood that he was
paying the penalty for the misunderstanding of the evening before,
and also for the morning’s shock to the teacher’s self-esteem. The
unfairness of it rankled deep. The loss of thirty-six hours at home,
the breaking of the engagement with his mother, the abandonment of
his plan of reunion with his old mates--all counted as nothing in
the balance when weighed against Mr. Alsop’s five minutes and ruffled
dignity. The worst of it was the fact that there was no appeal. The
principal was away on leave of absence for six months. Every teacher
was autocrat in his own courses. To resist would be to collide with the
whole machinery of government of an institution which prided itself on
expelling annually more boys than any other school in the land. Between
enduring in silence, and resorting to entreaties and flattery,--the
only alternatives,--Sam did not hesitate a moment. The one he could
bear, the other he would not stoop to.
On the way down to the telegraph office, where he sent a brief message
to his mother, announcing that he could not get away, Sam drew an angry
comparison between Mr. Alsop’s methods and those of certain other
instructors: Dr. Leighton in Greek had discovered his pupil’s weakness
on the verb and offered to give special help at any time the boy chose
to call at his room; Mr. Howe in mathematics, finding him well advanced
in geometry and algebra, had voluntarily suggested that he slight those
subjects and apply the time thus gained where it was more needed;
Professor Towle in English roughed him in the class when he got things
wrong, but Towle had a heart of gold and was square as a brick. On the
way back he dwelt on Mulcahy’s treacherous selfishness of the evening
before, which had set Mr. Alsop against him and had made him forget
that wretched vocabulary. “There’s one consolation,” he muttered to
himself. “I shan’t have to take him home with me now.”
But Mulcahy had no wish to be cheated of his visit to the Archers.
“I’ll fix that up,” he promised eagerly, when Sam informed him of the
change of plan. “Let me go and see Alsop. I’ll tell him a yarn that’ll
bring him round in five minutes.”
“What yarn?”
“Oh, I don’t know; any old thing that’ll go--something about a family
party, or your mother’s being sick and sending for you and your being
so overcome by losing his respect that you didn’t dare explain. It’ll
be dead easy.”
“Easy or not, you won’t do it!” replied Archer, savagely. “I won’t have
any one sucking round Alsop for me. You’ve told him lies enough, as it
is.”
“Don’t be a fool!” said Mulcahy, sharply. “Don’t you want to go?”
“No, I don’t. I did, but I don’t want to any more.”
Mulcahy, disappointed here, had other forms of amusement. That
afternoon Sam dropped in at the Sedgwicks’ to call, and allowed himself
to be persuaded to stay to dinner, at which meal he proved to his
own satisfaction that the disasters of the day had not affected his
appetite. Afterward he lingered in the society of Mrs. Sedgwick and
Miss Margaret as long as it seemed decent, and departed for his room
reasonably comforted in mind. As he crossed the street, in the rear of
the Academy buildings, two familiar figures appeared opposite him under
a gaslight and got away quickly into the darkness. They were John Fish
and Mulcahy, each with an overcoat on his arm.
The next day John Fish was at church, wedged into the corner of a pew.
He slept during most of the service. Mulcahy stayed in his room; his
report next day informed the authorities that he had been suffering
from an attack of indigestion. Fish took a long nap in the afternoon.
He told Mr. Alsop, as they walked to dinner together, that he liked
to pass Sunday quietly. Mulcahy was well enough to be present at the
Christian Fraternity in the evening.