He first emerged from obscurity at his father’s funeral. He was the only
son and the heir to everything, and therefore, of course, the center of
interest; but immediately and forever he destroyed all the tepid
sympathy and good will of the assembled relatives by his curious air of
immense carelessness, his foppish nonchalance.
He hadn’t even the decency to wear a dark suit, they observed. He was
dressed in light gray, evidently quite new, and he kept his hands in his
pockets. It never occurred to any of them that his indifference might be
a clumsy effort to conceal an immeasurable embarrassment. Neither did
any one else remember what he remembered--that his father had detested
any sort of formal mourning. And it was Tommy’s destiny always to do a
thing in the wrong way, always to antagonize, invariably to blunder.
It was not regret for the loss of his father, or any great regard for
his opinions, that caused Tommy to remember and to respect his wishes.
It was nothing more than a naïve and kindly sentimentality. His father
had been a horrible bully to him, the great bogey of his childhood. His
mother had died when he was very little, and he had been sent off to
boarding school at once.
It seemed to the family that Tommy had always been at school, winter and
summer. Once in a great while he had emerged at some cousin’s Christmas
party, a rather silly blond boy in military uniform, always spoken of as
“poor little Tommy Ellinger.” There were no family rumors or traditions
about him, no reports of his behavior at school.
Now, however, that he had definitely come to life, it was necessary for
the family to decide upon him, and they decided unfavorably. He got,
then and there, the name of being “defiant” and “conceited.”
His father’s elder brother was to be his guardian until he was
twenty-one--a task which disgusted and appalled Uncle James. He was an
old bachelor lawyer, living in a hotel. Naturally his first thought for
Tommy was college, which would remove the boy for all his minority, and
even longer; but Tommy fought desperately against that. His hatred for
books, for herding with other young males, for all the bullying and
chaffing which terrified his awkward innocence, for the competition
which dazed his lumbering mind, made him unusually resolute. Business,
too, he summarily repudiated.
“Then what do you intend to do?” his uncle demanded, with false
patience.
“Well,” said Tommy desperately, “why couldn’t I be a lawyer, like you?”
His uncle looked at him with a grim smile, and answered nothing. The
subject was dropped for the time being, and Tommy went to live at his
uncle’s hotel, to make up his mind about his very important future. He
lived a wretched sort of life, forever hanging about the lobby, or
sitting through vaudeville shows and musical comedies. He ate breakfast
with his exasperated old uncle every morning, and dinner almost every
evening.
There was something peculiarly and intolerably irritating about
Tommy--some quality which, in spite of his invariable good temper and
his ingratiating manners, infuriated his uncle. A perfect young ass, the
old lawyer called him.
Why was it that the qualities which would have been so endearing in a
girl of eighteen were so maddening in Tommy? Why was he, with his youth,
his boundless good will, his plaintive innocence, really nothing on
earth but a young ass?
He was a great lanky boy with a naïve, good-humored face and a
preposterous foppish air, a man-of-the-world air; wearing clothes
ostentatiously correct and an amazing eyeglass with a broad black
ribbon. He imagined that he looked like a foreign diplomat, while at the
bottom of his heart he was quite conscious of being and looking a puppy.
He swaggered, but without any self-assurance.
He devoted great thought to his clothes, and he could not refrain from
mentioning his sartorial inventions and improvements to his uncle.
“What do you think of the cut of this coat?” he would ask. “Do you
notice this shoulder? Rather good, eh?”
“Beautiful!” his uncle would say. “I never saw such grace and
elegance--a regular Beau Brummel! You’re fascinating. There’s nothing
that interests me like the cut of your coats!”
Then Tommy would open the evening paper and laugh loudly and
ostentatiously at something in it, to show how undisturbed he was.
“Why don’t you go out?” the old gentleman used to ask, often and often,
when, their dinner finished, they went up together in the lift to the
little sitting room they shared. “What’s the matter with you, Thomas? A
boy of your age, sitting at home here with an old fellow like me, night
after night! Why don’t you go out somewhere and enjoy yourself? Haven’t
you any friends?”
Well, he hadn’t. All the boys he had known and liked in the military
academy up the Hudson had come from the farthest ends of the
country--from Texas, from California, from Maine. He had never been
particularly popular, anyhow, and he was too shy and too ridiculous to
make friends now.
His uncle attached great importance to this, for he himself had scores
of friends. He wished Tommy to be a sort of creature the like of which
is no longer to be found--the traditional, old-fashioned beau, the
arbiter of elegance, welcomed everywhere, affable, agreeable, but
forever unattached, the society man of a past generation. He supplied
the boy with spending money, and introduced him to a few charming young
married women and a great many old bachelors.
“Now go ahead!” he told him. “Make yourself popular! Make yourself
liked! A young man of your age, of good family, with a little money in
your pockets, with good prospects!”
He was invited to one or two sedate houses, for his uncle’s sake, but
nothing came of it. The society life toward which his uncle urged him
forever eluded him. In fact, he had no life of any sort. He was only
waiting, hanging about in innocent and dreary idleness, unable to
believe that life should so cheat him of every joy, every excitement.
It was spring when Tommy’s father died and he left the military academy.
He spent a horrible summer with his uncle, in a hotel in town, or at
other similar hotels in the mountains, on the coast, anywhere and
everywhere. Then came a still worse winter, during which the old
gentleman’s exasperation rose to a fury.
They would go now and then to a musical comedy of the liveliest sort,
this being the Uncle James’s idea of what the boy ought to like. When
the old man saw him sitting there not liking it, when he saw him not
caring for or comprehending wines, a barbarian as to food, absolutely
indifferent to the arts, and hopeless in regard to sport, he became
almost homicidal.
“Go away!” he shouted at him. “Go and spend this summer by yourself! I
won’t waste the money on taking you to a decent place. Go on a farm! Go
to some cheap, miserable, damnable little country boarding house, where
you can sit and gape all day, like the booby you are!”
Tommy felt that it would be paradise now to get away from his uncle, no
matter where. The idea of going off alone, unbullied, unthwarted, quite
dazzled him. He was only too ready to go anywhere his uncle suggested.
So Uncle James answered several newspaper advertisements, and at last
found a place which he felt would be suitable. He wrote and made all
arrangements, and then gave Tommy his directions, money that was to last
him for a month, and the following advice:
“Don’t make a fool of yourself about any of the girls there. Remember,
you haven’t a penny for the next three years except what I choose to
allow you; and if you get yourself mixed up or compromised, I won’t help
you. I won’t recognize any responsibility of that sort!”
Tommy turned scarlet.
“Not in my line, Uncle James!” he replied, with extreme jauntiness. And
off he went.