was a sort of glorified "sic 'im!"
"On the contrary," said he, perfectly composed, "I think it's the girl
that's refined."
Miss Meiggs's "_What!_" was almost a shriek. Foo, the table-boy, brought
her just then a plate of creamy rarebit. He had a jacket of luminous
green silk, with the fraternity monogram in white, and he wore his cue
hanging. But the fragrance of the rarebit and the splendor of Foo's
toilet were alike lost upon the aroused Miss Meiggs. Such a statement,
from this man of all others!
"You are judging us with yourself as a basis of contrast, I fancy!"
Not displeased at having put her in ill-humor, and refusing a gentle
attempt on Mrs. Perkins' part to lead the conversation elsewhere, he
went on with aggravated seriousness:
"But there is hope for me here, with the Faculty and with books"--he
choked a little over this; "a man doesn't need to go through from one to
eight love-affairs."
The champion of co-education sniffed.
"Nothing was further from my thoughts," said she. "The association of
men and women in an atmosphere of study does not mean sentimentality.
The relation should be normal and helpful, not spoiled by extremes."
Katharine had heard these views before.
"But they can't dodge the extremes, you see," persisted Pellams. "It's
the place here, the walks and drives in the country and all. Your theory
might work all right at a city college or even at Berkeley, but on this
campus, not so!"
"The reasoning of inexperience. There are stronger interests in nature
than boy-and-girl foolishness--unless one is idle. Where it results in
that sort of thing, I agree that it is all wrong and prejudicial to
scholarship and thoroughly unnecessary and inexcusable"--with these
words a slow glance at Katharine that spoke of arguments in the past. "A
man does not have to fall in love purely because he and a girl are in
the country at the same time."
"But all the girls are not like you," began Pellams, and stopped at the
sound of the words. They were not in the least intended to be taken as
he felt that the table-full had taken them. Miss Meiggs put her fork
viciously into the neglected rarebit. In the uncomfortable pause, Mrs.
Perkins flutteringly passed her the cayenne pepper, but Miss Meiggs
ignored the courtesy. She turned to Pellams.
"Even a love-affair," she snapped, "would benefit you more than the
substitute you have chosen! You are a nice one to argue the refinement
of the college girl! Are you refining yourself, your fraternity or your
favorite side of the student-body by carousing at Mayfield and carrying
the viciousness of that town to others where you may represent the
University?"
"Oh, I say!" protested the Glee Club man, uneasily, for Grind was on the
Committee; "don't be too hard on me."
"I'm sure you're unjust to Pellams," said the Chapter-mother, with a
troubled look at her black lamb, who wondered what was coming: "I don't
believe he----"
Miss Meiggs, peppering her rarebit deliberately, interrupted, with a
little toss of the head.
"I will ask Mr. Chase one question then." She gathered some of the
cheese upon her fork, and, balancing it midway to her mouth, went on
with a gloating clearness of enunciation. "Please tell us why you came
to the afternoon concert at the Chico Normal School this summer in a
colored shirt and your dress suit, and why you did not sing your part of
the program?"
"That's two questions," murmured Pellams. He could not look at Mrs.
Perkins, to whom he had made certain solemn promises before that very
trip; but his adversary had turned toward her with a look of righteous
triumph. So deftly that even Pellams barely saw it, Katharine reached
across him and peppered the forkful of rarebit just before the lips of
Miss Meiggs closed over it. His answer was overlooked.
Mrs. Perkins took the sufferer up to her own room and Katharine vanished
somewhere with Smith. When the tables were removed, a girl sat at the
piano; her song finished, she struck briskly into the "Hot Time," and
every one turned to Pellams. He sang the rag-time as though he were
bursting with fun, while the Chapter sat before him, beaming its
innocent gratitude. But the Glee Club man was singing to one guest
alone, and he could not see her, or Smith either. When two songs had
failed to bring her into view, he stole off upstairs unmolested and lay
for some time with his door locked, grinning before sleep.
They hammered at his door next morning with appeals for his appearance
at first-hour recitation, and fraternal reminders that he hadn't
sufficient stand-in to cut. Foo went clanging the bell through the
halls, dodging the shoes that flew at him through the door of a man who
had nothing before the fourth hour, and the rush and hurry of late
breakfast-time filled the house. But Pellams lay smoking in his narrow
bed, engaged in the novel task of solving a point of etiquette. The
affair of the night before was to be his final appearance in local
society. His experience in small-talk with Miss Meiggs confirmed his
decision to live a college life into which co-education did not enter
outside his class-rooms. Yet, having once departed from the mode of such
a life, he found himself under an obligation. A co-ed had found him in
trouble and had done the "white" thing by him at a critical moment; even
Jimmy Mason, over at the Hall, could not have stood by him any better.
In an obligation to Jimmy there was no problem--only the matter of time
to do his part--but with a co-ed, Pellams felt that it was different.
She was not a feature of his life. To the woman-hater's mind, if a man
has become indebted to a girl, honor bids him pay the debt, the sooner
the better. He need never see the girl again, once the score is even.
This philosophy evolved, it took another cigarette to decide just how
the balance could be struck, and then Pellams went downstairs to wheedle
a remnant of breakfast from the indulgent Foo.
Applied to the new element into which he had ventured, something of the
keen observation which the Junior devoted to football practice might
have made the payment of his debt to Katharine Graham a transaction of
less public note. He would have waited, probably, with the brazenness
that characterizes local courtship, at the door of the library and
caught her as she emerged. Or he would have learned what mails she
usually waited for at the post-office and would have lingered until she
had opened her box and had started back toward the Quad pretending to
look over her correspondence. Or else he would have watched her classes
and happened along by accident just as she was coming out for a vacant
hour. But these established forms had escaped his notice. Instead, he
did what he considered the "proper," and drove dashingly up to Roble in
Paulsen's best single rig and his own new fall suit.
Roble caught sight of him beyond the flower beds, over the heads of the
tall pampas. The news electrified the dormitory. A Freshman stopped her
experimental lab-work with the piano, and joined the others behind the
lace at the parlor windows. A group of girls, chatting on the yellow
railing of the steps, watched the approach of the apparition. Pellams
Chase coming to Roble! Not since the morning Mt. Hamilton was covered
with snow had there been such a phenomenon.
"I believe he's coming to take Florence to drive!" said a mischievous
Theta Gamma, looking toward Miss Meiggs, who sat frowning at the
approaching buggy.
"He ought to," laughed Katharine Graham's roommate, "for not telling her
how much red pepper she had put on her rarebit while she was absorbed in
talking to him!"
"If he's coming for me," said the Senior grimly, "I shall not disappoint
him."
"What!" cried Katharine; "you wouldn't go with him, Florence! Why, we
none of us met him until last night."
"Last night I was unfortunately absent-minded," answered Miss Meiggs,
"and I did not say all I wanted to. It wouldn't be a pleasant drive!"
"He would have you at his mercy--you shan't go!" laughed another girl,
"it would be flying in the face of Providence as well as of Propriety!"
"I can't imagine whom he's coming for," said Katharine, who was sure
that he was coming for her. She thought out the severe little refusal
she should make him when he had drawn her aside.
The stranger scraped his buggy wheels delicately along the curbing of
the Roble walk. The group of girls on the steps was an unexpected
ordeal. He caught sight of the amused faces behind the curtains above
him and almost lost his nerve.
"Rubber!" he growled. He had made many a clever entrance in the student
theatricals, but to-day in climbing out of the buggy he got badly
tangled in the reins. In spite of his desperate will, his face was
growing red. With painfully fixed gaze he came up the steps toward the
Theta Gammas; standing uneasily before them, he blurted out, with no
preliminaries whatever:
"Miss Graham, would you like to go driving?"
Katharine straightened and looked at him coolly. One of the girls gave a
little gasp at his impertinence.
"It isn't customary, I believe," said Katharine, "to ask to go driving
with a girl you have met once, at a supper."
"Isn't it?" faltered Pellams. There was not a vestige of his usual
bravado about him. Katharine met his honest gaze, hesitated, then said:
"But I shall be delighted to go, just the same. Will you come in and
wait till I get my things?"
They curved round the Dormitory lawn and away toward the La Honda
redwoods, leaving the astounded young women on the porch to discuss, as
women sometimes do, the peculiar behavior of their departed sister.
She explained it to Pellams during the drive. To his surprise, he
learned that he had been hopelessly ill-bred to ask her at all; that had
the invitation not been given before the other girls he should have
driven away alone. As it was, she was in for no end of criticism. She
discouraged any conversation upon the subject of cayenne pepper.
Furthermore, she declared herself in full accord with Florence Meiggs
as regarded love affairs; she believed in them as little as her elder
sister; good-fellowship, without sentiment, was possible and quite
sufficient. Pellams, having resolved upon the utmost good-nature during
the drive, put the pride of the livery stable through her best paces and
allowed his companion to declare her views unquestioned. Toward the end
of the afternoon, he deposited her at the Roble door with a pleasant
feeling that he had done his duty and was through with co-eds forever.
A wild uproar filled the Rho dining-room when the gallant came in to
dinner, late. With an exasperating readiness of conclusion, the crowd
congratulated him upon his change of heart, they welcomed to their
ranks, with much clinking of water glasses, another true lover, and
Smith sang derisively an adaptation of his own:
"Pellams Chase, the Glee Club Man,
Swore upon the book
For wife he'd have a cider-can,
For bed the ingle-nook--
Petticoats he thus forsook!"
Instead of raising the expected storm of denial, Pellams looked guilty
and uncomfortable. In spite of their knowledge of the man, they did not
divine that their teasing had given him an inspiration.
[Illustration: THEY DROVE AWAY TOWARD THE LA HONDA REDWOODS.]
His idea for a josh involved Miss Graham. So he waited for her
deliberately outside the door of the French class next morning; she had
stopped to talk to the instructor after the class had left. Jimmy Mason
and four or five of the regular Quad loafers were talking football on
the curbing. Pellams joined them. Then the gravity of the step he was
about to take came over him with a sense of oppression. He felt much as
on that Easter morning, years before, when his mother had dragged him
out to be confirmed.
"The Berkeley faculty won't let Dudley play," Mason was saying. "He
hasn't--where are you speeding in such a rush?" he added and then
stopped, paralyzed.
It is probable that if her eyes had not laughed at him with that twinkle
of good-fellowship which he had noted on the night of the supper,
Pellams never would have had the nerve. That look hauled him over the
Rubicon; they went down the arcade together, in the face of Jimmy Mason,
the loafers, the whole crowd shifting between lectures. Yet the sun
shone as brightly on the palm-circles, the Quadrangle pillars kept their
perpendicular. A little later Mason saw the couple sitting under the
'Ninety-five Oak. He whistled to himself with a look that meant: "You
wait, old josher till you get into the Knockery again!"
"Now," said Pellams, under the Oak, "you have about the same ideas on
love-affairs as I have and you'll sympathize with me in this thing. When
I got in to dinner last night, the gang gave me the hottest jolly of my
misspent life. They're all alike; they can't understand having a
straight friendship for a girl without it's being a puppy-love. So they
tumble at once that my driving you means I'm yours for keeps. That sort
of a thing makes me tres fatigue and I've a scheme."
"Not your first, is it?"
"In what way do you--"
"I know something of your 'schemes,' young man; that fake fraternity and
the snipe-hunts and an examination in English 1 c."
"Oh, those!" Pellams did not blush at the record. Instead, he smiled.
His smile was always worth seeing. It was the point of one of his Club
stunts. Every muscle got into the interference and his round face grew
rosy into the roots of his thick brown hair.
This grin was not lost upon Katharine.
"What am I to do, pray?" asked she; "pose as Professor of Domestic
Economy?"
"This is a bird of a josh on the house," he cried. "You'll come in on
it, won't you?"
"Plans first, before I commit myself. You might want me to elope in a
buggy."
"Never again!" declared Pellams; "my idea is, why can't we pretend to
have a case on each other--not any passing fancy, but a real peacherino,
like the best of them?"
Somewhat to his surprise, the girl was not visibly enthusiastic.
"Just how do I profit, please, if I butcher myself to make your Roman
holiday?"
"You can die happy, knowing we've pulled their le--bluffed 'em
beautifully. You're down on love-affairs yourself, you told--"
"Your philosophy of heaven includes a josh on the other fellow, I verily
believe," returned Katharine, smiling; "but it is just possible, you
know--shall I be very frank?"
"You have been, before!"
"Well, then, I might, you know, prefer the society of some other men in
college to the exclusive privilege of yours, even with this wonderful
josh thrown in."
"Who, Smith?"
"There are others."
"I know I'm not much of a sq--ladies'-man," he persisted; "but I can
learn, can't I?"
"Your manners are not very dreadful when you think about them; but oh,
you have lots to master, the little things, you know."
"I let you carry your books this morning--"
"Bravo!--if you only learn to think of them sooner--all the little ways
a girl--"
"Sure--you can teach me and rap my knuckles--"
"That would be a pleasure. I've wanted to do it for months."
"And, you see, you'd have the distinction of being the only one I
couldn't hold out against."
"Oh, above all things, don't be conceited, or I can't think of it."
"That means you will think of it?"
"You're really not half bad! You caught _that_ on time. Yes, I'll help
you in your joke, to punish their silliness, but only for a week, on
trial you understand."
Pellams, gratified, put out his hand, not in fashionable wise, but as he
would grip a man's. Yet in doing so he noted, looking at her fully for
the first time, that the light hair on her temples came down low on the
sides, as his mother's did.
On the way up to her room, Miss Graham stood for some moments smiling at
an irrelative picture of Westminster Abbey, hanging in the parlor.
Having gone driving before their faces, it was more presentable not to
be dropped. Also, there was an undeniable pleasure in refuting any of
Florence Meiggs's arguments, the one concerning love-affairs and
scholarship, for instance. Besides, he was a dear, amusing thing, and a
perfect novice.
During the week that followed, Pellams learned a few things. The
experiment was by no means a bore. He discovered that it is easier to be
joshed than to josh--when you know in your heart you have the joke on
the other fellow. He learned the revengefulness of Perkins' nature, old
Ted, who was ragged to death when his case on Lillian Arnold developed
and who now paid him back with interest. He found how great an object of
interest to the co-ed element a man becomes when he is in love. All this
was good for the woman-hater, giving him new views of things and
teaching him patience. Many times during the ordeal he blessed his
dramatic talent. It helped him to pretend a chap when he did not feel
it. It served him in assuming an air of "the game is worth the candle,"
when the whole tableful at the house requoted to him certain scathing
remarks on the girl-habit which, in the day of his single blessedness,
he had made to each one of them separately. It was more than useful to
him when he rolled into the "Knockery," the second evening after his sad
condition had become patent, and the assembled company rose to smother
him with sofa cushions and lecture him, with decided seriousness, on the
evil effect of girling. There were times, indeed, when he didn't have to
assume any chap at all, when it came of itself; for example, when the
crowd punned on the girl's name, "Graham gems" was a favorite. Somehow,
he wished that they wouldn't drag in names that way.
The week ended. He had done beautifully. Looking it over, he was proud
of his achievements. Two evenings at the library; a brazen walk every
day at the 10.30 period, which both had vacant; a stroll in the moonlit
Quad, planned to interest the crowd at the Tuesday evening lecture; two
calls at Roble--that was going it pretty heavy. The whole college was
smiling at them, and the foolish Rho house hugged itself in the blissful
silence of his sarcastic tongue.
This review of the week delighted Pellams. He hunted up Katharine the
last afternoon and asked for a renewal of the contract.
She laughed.
"Are you sure you can help the extremes? You know the Quadrangle and the
walks in the country--"
"Listen to the Mocking Bird!" gurgled Pellams. He was feeling very well
pleased with things in general.
[Illustration: A STROLL IN THE MOONLIT QUAD, PLANNED TO INTEREST THE
CROWD AT THE TUESDAY EVENING LECTURE.]
"The product of the means is a bully good josh," he laughed, "and I'm
not afraid of the product of the extremes; it's only equal to the same
thing--now there's higher mathematics for you!" and Pellams danced the
and she made him be serious and take up his work. The first quarter of
an hour she called him to order twice--first for trying to trap with a
lariat of grass an inquisitive gray lizard spying at them from a
fence-rail; second, for enticing into conversation the huge Danish
hound, whose bark is so much worse than his bite, and who, having been a
pup with the University, knows something of every Stanford "case" ever
developed in the pleasant shade of his domain. After fifteen minutes of
impeccable behavior, Pellams whispered:
"Say--"
"Silence!"
"Well, I'd like to have _some_ attention paid me. Call me down just to
show that you're alive."
She pointed to his History and subsided into her English Poets. When she
came to earth again, the sun was low beyond the eucalyptus trees. There
was a regular sound near her which she realized having heard for some
time in her sub-consciousness. She peeped over the high-growing root
between them. The man whom she was helping slept peacefully, his book
closed and his mouth open, and only the suspicion of a snore stirring
the quiet autumn air.
"I shall never have any trouble with him!" thought Katharine, with just
the faintest discontent, as she dropped a twig on his face, by way of
waking him without embarrassment.
The autumn rains came and the dry, sniffly dust of the campus lay flat
under the quiet air; the clear, fall weather that is mixed in one's mind
with the pungent smell of tarweed in the pasture lands, and with long
exciting afternoon practices, hung cool over the land, and still Pellams
went girling, with his beautiful joke on the college. Katharine's secret
joke on him had succeeded equally well. The woman-hater's class work had
undergone a transfiguration. People noticed it. At the opening of the
term he had put Professor Leyne's course in "Renaissance Poets" on his
schedule card, because it was a proclaimed snap and because two of the
three Rhos who took it the year before had kept their set-papers.
Professor Leyne loved to draw covert allusions from what he called "the
ocean of young life that swells around us." One day he threw out a
direct allusion. Stopping in his remarks about chivalry, he sunk his
voice to an impressive, confidential tone, looking almost directly at
the impassive Pellams in the back row.
"And I think sometimes," he said, "when I see the youth feeling the
uplifting earnestness of first love--when I see it taking him gently by
the hand and saying to him 'my son, there are higher things'; when I see
him putting his spirit with new zeal to the tasks that are laid before
him, when I see him realizing that life is indeed serious and its end
the fulfilment"--and so on until the bell rang, while the subject of the
eulogy, outwardly calm, grinned fiendishly in his secret soul, for only
himself, the professor and one other knew that he had scored an A on his
last two papers as against a D earlier in the year. The professor
himself did not know that these same papers were a good part Katharine
Graham, who had suggested the ideas to Pellams and had then stood over
him while he put them into his own turgid but interesting English.
Similar results ensued in French, which they prepared together, and he
so endeared himself to the History professor that that worthy expanded
to the point of a hint at an entrance to the seminary the next semester.
The superior Miss Meiggs, pondering upon the remarkable change in her
classmate, saw with concern this renegade disproving an argument with
which she had enlivened many a Theta Gamma meeting. She never guessed
with what patience Katharine was training his wandering attention. She
was not present during the afternoons of real, quiet study which were
forced out of him between luncheon and football practice.
By the time their contract, renewed from week to week, had been
operating for two months, Pellams began to wonder just where the point
of the joke came in. People had become used to the condition. The House
could rely on him and his singing, and girls came oftener than ever to
Sunday supper. The Knockery took his affairs as an accepted fact. They
no longer had any new jokes on it. Jimmy Mason grumbled now and then
because his chum was queening "like all the rest of the frat-men," and
their jovial expeditions to Mayfield were over, "because _she_ wouldn't
understand" (most conclusive proof!), but he ended by taking it as he
might have taken an inequality of temper--as a flaw in character to be
overlooked in a friend. Then again, Pellams found it positively uncanny
to be getting on so well in his work, an uneasy feeling as though he
were walking along the edge of a steep place. As for the joke itself, he
could laugh over it with Katharine, but there was no way to spring it. A
josh that has not a public end lacks art. He realized that the idea had
seemed very rich when he conceived it and that he had plunged into it
without considering its finish, and of course an impractical girl
wouldn't look so far ahead. Now, he saw that it had ceased to be a josh
at all, where other people were concerned.