You can well understand the elation with which I announced my success
to Gladys Todd. It was magnified by the month of disappointment, and
to her I felt that I owed a debt. Though I had come to look with irony
on her high-flown expressions of faith in me, I realized that the fear
of her equally high-flown scorn had more than once kept me from
abandoning my project. With pride I enclosed in my letter my account
of the funeral of Mr. Weinberg, though I refrained from marring the
trophy with an explanation that this first public production of my pen
had been allowed to attain the length of a column because his store
covered half a block and his advertisements many pages of _The Record_.
As a trophy Gladys Todd received it. Declaring that she lacked words
in which to express her pride in her knight, she flew to greater
heights than ever before. She had placed my first journalistic effort
in a scrap-book, and all that I wrote was to be preserved in like
manner. I must send her every published line that came from my pen.
Her knight had triumphed in his first real passage at arms, and she
sent to me a chaplet of victory. It came--not a wreath, but a cushion
worked with her own hands, mauve and white, the colors of McGraw, with
'91 in black on one side and on the other the word "Excelsior."
The scrap-book grew rapidly to alarming proportions, for having now my
opportunity I worked hard, and Mr. Hanks was fond of telling me that I
was rapidly outgrowing the reputation Doctor Todd and Mr. Pound had
made for me on Park Row. Accounts of murders, suicides, yacht-races,
robberies, public meetings, railroad accidents--all the varied events
which make up a day's news--followed the funeral into Gladys Todd's
archives. You can readily imagine that my views of life soon underwent
a change. They became rather distorted, as I see them now; and was it
a wonder when my day began at noon and ended in the small hours of the
morning, carried me through hospitals, police-stations, and courts,
from the darkest slums to the stateliest houses on the Avenue, from the
sweatshop to the offices of the greatest financiers. To me all men
were simply makers of news, and by their news value I judged them. A
man's greatness I measured by the probable length of his obituary
notice. Indeed, greatness itself was but the costume of a puppet, so
often did I see the sawdust stuffing oozing from the gashes in the
cloth. When I met one bank cashier simply because he had stolen, I
forgot the thousands of others who were plodding away through lives of
dull honesty. Because one Sunday-school superintendent sinned, I
classed all his kind as sinners. Becoming versed in the devious ways
of statesmen, I began to doubt the virtues of my old heroes whose
speeches I had often declaimed with so much unction. I became a cynic.
At twenty-two my thoughts matched the epigrams of Rochefoucauld and my
philosophy that of Schopenhauer. All my old ideas as to the importance
of the work I had chosen and of my own value to the world were quickly
dissipated. Often I had cause to remember the Professor and his
argument that even of our good actions selfishness was the main-spring,
and accepting it as true, and laying bare the roots of my own motives
and of those around me, I should have moved confusedly in the darkness
had I not come to see more clearly what he meant by marching under
sealed orders and to realize that I had a duty and that it was to live
by the light I had. I did try to do this. I had a conscience, and
though I might believe that it was but a group of conceptions as to the
nature of right and wrong poured into my mind by my early instruction,
it protested as strongly against abuse as did my digestive organs.
Sometimes I had to effect strange compromises with it. Sometimes, in
my never ceasing search for facts, I found myself causing pain and
trouble to those who were innocently brought under the shadow of crime
and scandal, but I justified myself by the theory that they suffered
for the good of the many. To me the old dictum that the end justifies
the means became a useful balm.
You might think that, with so radical a change in my ideas, I should
see Gladys Todd in another light than that of my college days. Indeed,
looking back, those college days did seem of another age and another
world, but in them Gladys Todd had become linked to me by ties as
indissoluble as those which bound me to my father and mother. To what
I deemed my broader view of life, their ways of living and their ways
of thinking were certainly exceedingly narrow, but none the less I
thought of them only with reverence and affection. So it was with
Gladys Todd. That mirthful outburst over her effusion about the
crusader was followed by many of its kind as her daily letters came to
me, but this meant simply that I was growing older than she, and she to
my mind became a child, but was none the less lovely for her
unsophistication. In the turmoil of my daily work, in the unlovely
clatter of Miss Minion's boarding-house, I often recalled the vine-clad
veranda and our walks in the grass-grown lane, looked back to them
regretfully, looked forward yearningly to the renewal of such hours.
Sometimes when my evening was free from my routine duty, and I was
working harder than ever I had worked in my college days, I would
forget my task to dream of the time when Miss Tucker's piano would no
longer be clattering beneath me, and I should be no more disturbed by
Mrs. Kittle, who had a habit of jumping her chair around the room next
to mine, when somewhere in the city's outskirts I should have a house
of my own, a little house in a bit of green, where I could find quiet
and peace and Gladys Todd. For the realization of that dream all that
I needed was money. By the lack of it I was condemned to Miss
Minion's. Even when I had attained to the munificent salary of Mr.
Carmody, a figure which Boller had announced to me with so much awe, I
was still far from having an income to keep two in the simplest
comfort. It was difficult to make this clear to Gladys Todd. Her
father and mother had married on eight hundred dollars a year, and even
now my salary equalled the doctor's as president of the college. To
her my salary read affluence, and in my letters I began to have
difficulty to convince her that I had not grown exceedingly worldly and
was not putting material comfort in the balance against unselfish and
uncomplaining love. On my third biannual visit to Harlansburg I went
armed with facts and figures as to house rents and flat rents, the
prices of meats per pound, the cost of fuel, light, and clothing.
Having in my pocket such a tabulated statement which showed for
incidentals a balance of but fifty dollars, I could not but smile
ironically at the manner in which Doctor Todd presented me to his
friends. Boller was forgotten. Boller's achievements were outshone by
those of David Malcolm. Malcolm's success demonstrated the high
character of McGraw's system of training. Malcolm was already being
heard from!
Malcolm, with the problem which confronted him, was inwardly gauging
his success by his bank account, and even the pride of Gladys Todd was
a little clouded when she was called upon to use the same measure.
Sitting in the very chair in the shaded lamplight from which she had
looked so admiringly on Boller two years before, she now studied the
prospectus of our contemplated venture. She was very lovely, but I
remember noticing what I had never before noticed, the wisps of hair
which floated a little untidily about her ears. And I did what I had
never done before--I compared her with another woman, with Miss Tucker,
whose piano had so often disturbed my evening labors. Miss Tucker
taught mathematics in an uptown girls' school. She was not as pretty
as Gladys Todd, but I remembered how wonderfully neat she was, with
never a hair blowing loose, and I remembered too that, though she had
disturbed me with her music, I never complained of it, for the sake of
the picture which she made every morning when she descended the stoop
beneath my window, going to her work as cheerfully and daintily as many
of her sisters would to a dinner or a dance.
"We shall only have a hundred dollars left for doctor's bills and
car-fare then, David," said Gladys Todd, looking up from the paper.
There were tears in her eyes, but they did not affect me as much as her
way of doing her hair. How I longed for the courage to tell her that
it was decidedly bad form!
"But we shall only have to wait a little longer, Gladys," said I, and I
moved my chair beside her chair.
"I know," she returned more bravely, putting her hand in mine. "But
you don't realize how lonely I am without you. I want to be with you,
helping you--to be at your side comforting you when you are tired,
cheering you when you are discouraged."
For that moment I forgot the stray wisps and the Langtry knot.
"But it is only a little while longer," I pleaded. "Let us say in
June. I shall come for you in June. You will wait for me till June?"
Her hand was on my shoulder, and I forgot all about Miss Tucker. For
that moment I was the happiest of men.
"Wait for you till June?" she cried. "Why, David, I'd wait for you to
eternity."
"You need not," I replied, laughing. "In June I am coming to take you
to a little house on a green hill, with a veranda where we can sit on
my holidays, you painting tulips on black plaques, and I--well, I with
you, just thinking how wonderful it all is and----"
"How wonderful it will be in June!" said Gladys Todd.