saved somebody or other’s life by coolly dangling himself to the bridle
of a big, runaway horse. The occasion on which he drew red hot poker
sketches where a dog had bitten the calf of his leg, has likewise had
its historians. But no one has ever described what took place when, in
the midst of Charlie Bolo’s exposition of tile painting, Dickey called,
“Come in!” to a doubting knock at the door, and Mrs. Dawson advanced two
steps into the study and then stopped.
For a moment no one, with the exception of Dawson, grasped the
situation. He had grasped it and was wrestling with it as he threw off
the rug that covered him where he lay on the sofa--as he stepped across
the room--as he placed his hands on his mother’s shoulders and kissed
her lightly on the cheek. He had grasped the situation, but he was
utterly at a loss to know what to do with it.
“Didn’t you get my telegram?” his mother was saying; “why, that’s
funny--I sent one from the hotel quite a time ago, ‘Am worried about
sore throat will come to see you’--just ten words exactly.”
Then he found himself introducing his three friends to her: Tommy first,
Charlie Bolo second, and Bigelow last, and as he pronounced their names
slowly and distinctly, he tried to look ahead and discover what he
should do next.
On realising that the impassive Tommy was being presented to her, Mrs.
Dawson began to extend her hand toward him; but her impulse collapsed
for some reason or other and the movement resulted in nothing more
definite than the disclosure of her silk mits.
The three men were so completely outside of any calculations she had
made before knocking on her son’s door, that she had nothing to say to
them just then, so she turned once more to Dickey with frank adoration
and said,--
“I _was_ worried about your throat.”
“I suppose, like the rest of us, Mrs. Dawson, you have found out how
seriously he objects to the serious,” ventured Charlie Bolo airily. The
smile Mrs. Dawson gave him did not lack sweetness, for she had been
looking at Dickey; but it was desperately vague, and Bolo felt that he
had made a false start.
“They are taking pretty good care of me, don’t you think?” There was
something pallid and heroic about Dickey’s playfulness.
“Oh, this college life!” began Mrs. Dawson, forgetfully. She was trying
to recollect a clipping she had once made from a newspaper.
“There’s a lack of woman’s sweeping, without doubt,” grumbled Bigelow
jocosely--the music books he had been examining had dirtied his hands.
“Richard, what was that piece I cut from the ‘Weekly’ and sent you last
year?” Mrs. Dawson sat down in the chair Dickey pushed toward her. It
was a heavy chair of dark wood, and gave Tommy a vicious desire to look
at the picture on the mantelpiece. Dickey elaborated the little anecdote
to which his mother referred and made the most of it--it was nearly
dinner time; the fellows would certainly go soon.
“You have so many books, Richard,” said Mrs. Dawson, looking about the
room for the first time.
“Aren’t his shelves attractive,” assented Tommy with enthusiasm. “I
think you would approve of everything there too, Mrs. Dawson, with the
possible exception of this, which you undoubtedly know enough about to
disapprove of.” He laughingly handed her a volume of “Degeneration” from
the table. Dawson could have slain him had he not realised that all
three fellows must be somewhat bewildered.
“Isn’t it--isn’t it--thick--” faltered Mrs. Dawson.
“What _is_ one to think of a creature like Nordau?” asked Bigelow,
theatrically; “that is to say, of course, beyond his exquisitely
unconscious sense of humour.” He had made this remark on several
previous occasions, and its technique was, in consequence, becoming
quite perfect. Mrs. Dawson looked helplessly at Dickey and said nothing.
She was at least displaying what Charlie Bolo called “admirable _savoir
taire_.”
When she opened the volume and leaned over to examine the title-page,
Tommy gave the photograph on the mantelpiece a surreptitious glance.
There was a more or less grotesque resemblance in it to the almost
portly, middle-aged original, who was dressed with a quiet absence of
taste and answered in a general way Tommy’s description of a superior
woman. It was very embarrassing and inexplicable and altogether
impossible. Tommy did not understand it--he did not understand anything
any more, and only wished to get outside and pinch himself and Charley
Bolo and Bigelow.
Dickey Dawson did most of the talking, and achieved thereby a dismal
sort of success. His mother had introduced--or rather stumbled
on--fallen over--the subject of books, and for a time it was as if
Dawson had said to himself,--
“Books! books! what can I say of the origin, development, history, and
present condition of books?” For he chattered incessantly about
them--his own--Tommy’s--anybody’s. He told funny stories that were not
in the least funny, about book agents, and was in the midst of a
detailed description of a book-case when he realised he was making a
fool of himself and stopped.
“I like reading,” mused Mrs. Dawson, as she mechanically turned the
leaves of “Degeneration.” “I think it cultivates the observation.”
“I feel sometimes that it would be more advisable to cultivate blindness
than observation,” answered Tommy. He was becoming reckless and got up
to go.
Mrs. Dawson’s lips parted to say something, but Dickey broke in with,--
“I wish one of you fellows would kindly stop at the stable and send
round a cab. It is too late for my mother to go back to town in the
car.”
A protest from Mrs. Dawson seemed imminent, but she apparently thought
better of it and returned to the book.
The getting away was difficult, but not nearly so difficult as staying
any longer would have been. They chirped “goodbyes,” and “get well
soons,” and “so glad to have met yous,” galore, and Bigelow felt waxing
within him a new and passionate love for his own family, who were all
decently dead. Then they echoed off through a long corridor. After they
had gone Mrs. Dawson said nothing for several minutes, and Dickey made a
noise with the fire.
“They’re queer young men,” she finally reflected aloud. “Do you like
them very much, Richard?”
“Oh, yes,” answered Dickey, indifferently, “you get to like people you
see a great deal, I imagine.” He sat on the arm of his mother’s chair
and held one of his mother’s hands and kissed it.
“I wonder if you get to _dis_like people you _don’t_ see much of,” said
Mrs. Dawson. She was turning the leaves of her book without stopping to
look at them.
“Not if you ever truly loved them,” answered Dickey, tenderly drawing
nearer to her and laying his cheek against hers. He was almost overdoing
the thing.
“Not if you ever truly loved them, I suppose,” thoughtfully repeated his
mother with more intelligence than Dickey had ever given her credit for.
Then she began to turn the leaves of the book all over again.
WOLCOTT THE MAGNIFICENT
I
In some way or other it came to the notice of Barrows, the Recording
Secretary, that Ernest McGaw was literally starving. The Secretary,
being a person of appreciation, immediately gave the man food.
“I’m a horribly busy creature,” he said to McGaw; “but if you’ll come
round to dinner with me at the Colonial Club this evening, we can talk
about things.” Of course McGaw went and dined--for the first time in
months; for two weeks he had been keeping himself half alive on oatmeal
that he cooked in a shallow tin apparatus, over the lamp he studied by.
The Secretary had ridden a bicycle that afternoon, and seemed half
famished himself, which soothed McGaw’s raw, quivering sensibilities
from the first. Then, besides, Barrows was probably the most genial,
natural, receptive, unacademic person that ever answered to an official
name. So afterwards, when they went into an unoccupied room upstairs,
and the Secretary smoked a cigar, it was more than easy--it was
comforting--for McGaw to tell him the whole squalid little tragedy.
There was nothing particularly new in it to the Secretary, since he was
a gentleman who spent his life in making the struggle easier for men who
tried to go through college with a capital consisting of fourteen cents
and a laudable ambition. Youth and bitterness in combination were some
of the materials he dealt in. Barrows could have told the story of
McGaw’s pinched, colourless existence much better than McGaw could; yet
for an hour or more he listened, questioned, discussed, and was moved.
Later, when he and McGaw parted in the Yard, the Secretary, before going
to bed, wrote a carefully thought-out letter to Sears Wolcott 2nd, of
the sophomore class.
Sears Wolcott got the letter the next evening, when he stopped a moment
in Claverly, on his way from the training table to his club,--that is
to say, to one of his clubs. He was a member of two, besides, naturally,
the Institute, of whose privileges, by the way, he rarely availed
himself. After dining at the training table with his class crew, he
usually dropped in at his nearest club to smoke the one pipeful allowed
him by his captain. To-night, however, Barrows’ letter put him in such a
bad temper that he forgot about his pipe, looked sullen, and spoke to no
one. Wolcott was a very big boy; when he was angry, he seemed to swell
and swell until everything in the vicinity got out of drawing. Nobody
but Haydock had even noticed him come in; the others were too absorbed
in drinking their coffee and chattering about the class races. Haydock’s
greeting, “How is The Magnificent One this evening?” did not meet with
the reception that encourages further pleasantries. Haydock was the only
other man in the club who was not talking as fast and as loud as he knew
how. But his quiet was as different from The Magnificent One’s as the
placid stillness of a summer evening differs from the awful silence in
which one waits for a funnel-shaped cloud to mature. Haydock had a big
cigar in one hand and a little coffee-cup in the other. He was thinking
that a good room in a good club, with its dark walls, and all its
leather chairs and divans and rugs, with its magazines and convenient
lights to read them by, with its absence of personal individuality, was,
especially just after dinner, the most satisfactory spot in the world.
Even the background of cheerful noise was agreeable. “As long as you’re
not called on to help make it,” added Haydock to himself, as one of the
talkers detached himself from the others, and, flourishing a paper in
his face, called out:--
“Who wants to subscribe to the Prospect Union?”
Wolcott reached for the nearest newspaper, and buried himself in it; he
couldn’t endure Ellis.
“Who wants to subscribe to the Prospect Union? Only a dollar,” repeated
Ellis, wiggling his subscription list before Wolcott’s eyes.
“What the devil is the Prospect Union?” growled Wolcott. He crumpled
the “Transcript” and tossed it back on the table.
“Why, don’t you know?” asked Ellis, in genuine surprise. “I’ve taught
geography there for two years.”
Wolcott snapped back a single word. It was neither a pretty word nor a
refined one; the mildest significance one could attach to it was that
Wolcott was scarcely in sympathy with Ellis or anything that was his.
“The Prospect Union,” explained Haydock, in the deliberate way that was
so often taken seriously, “is a most admirable educational institution,
carried on in Cambridgeport by the Harvard undergraduate. It is
elaborately designed to make the lower classes--the labouring
man--dissatisfied with his station in life. I am proud to say, that I
once went there every Friday night for six months to teach two
bricklayers, three dry-goods clerks, and a nigger how to appreciate the
beautiful works of the late Mr. Keats. I spoiled their lives, and they
all love me. Allow me, in my humble way, to help the cause.” He rolled a
silver dollar the length of the table to Ellis. Ellis smiled, and put
the money in his pocket; he considered Haydock a very “unmoral” person
indeed, but liked him, and hoped that some day he would make something
of himself.
“That’s very nice--now who’s the next patron?” the philanthropist went
on, earnestly. “The Prospect Union is really a mighty fine thing. Even
if the men down there don’t learn very much out of books, they can come
there and see us,” he had almost unnoticeably emphasised the “us.”
“My God!” said Wolcott, slowly. The words and the way he sized up Ellis,
from top to toe, were heavy with a sort of thick-headed contempt. “They
can go there and look at _you_, can they?” Wolcott muttered the
unrefined word again. Then he got up with an enormous stretch, yawned,
looked at Ellis once more, and laughed, as he went out of the room.
Of the lesser brutalities, a contemptuous laugh is, perhaps, the most
brutal of all. Ellis’s thin face reddened. There was silence until the
outer door slammed.
“Damn such a man!” declared Ellis, in a loud whisper. This was bold
language for him to speak. Later in the night, he woke up and thought
about it.
“Oh, I wouldn’t,” protested Haydock, mildly. “He’s so magnificent.”
“Well, I can’t see it!” Ellis was smarting; but he couldn’t relieve
himself with the appropriate sharp retort; it didn’t come to him until
later on, in bed. “No one has any right to be such a hog,--especially in
a club. Besides, I wasn’t talking to him in particular. He needn’t have
subscribed, if he didn’t want to; I never expected he would, although
almost every one else has. What’s a dollar anyhow?” he shrugged his
shoulders.
“Yes, what is it?” piped a tiny person, trying to relieve the tension,
from the other side of the table. “I haven’t seen one since the first of
last February.”
“No, but seriously,” demanded Ellis,--he was always demanding something
seriously,--“what do you think of a man who does things like that, not
only once, but every day--all the time?”
“Well, what did he do?” Haydock was never unprepared to take the other
side of any argument in which Ellis engaged. “In the first place, he
came into the club so quietly that no one but me noticed him. He sat
down and read his mail, and didn’t join in the clatter about the class
races, because, knowing something about the subject, what the rest of
you fellows had to say probably didn’t interest him; and he isn’t a
talkative person, ever. Well, then you tried to get him to subscribe to
that foolish night school for æsthetic butchers. I confess his answer
was not--not exactly urbane. But it’s just possible that your request
was ill-timed.”
“Don’t you think that’s one trouble with Sears?” piped the tiny one, who
had become interested. “He always gives you the feeling that everything
you say is ‘ill-timed’!”
“The great, big, angry bull!” added Ellis. “And just the other day,” he
went on, suddenly remembering another of Wolcott’s atrocities, “he took
a letter away from Billy Bemis, held him off with one hand and began to
read it,--right out loud in the club; and when Billy snatched it away,
Wolcott picked him up and threw him clear across the room on to the
divan, and almost broke his back. Now I don’t think that any man who
pretends to be a gentleman--”
“Oh, write a letter to the ‘Crimson’ about it--” yelled some one who,
though trying to read in the next room, apparently could not help
following the discussion.
“He was probably feeling his oats a little that day,” suggested Haydock,
placidly. “Why shouldn’t he? He’s just like a fine stallion snorting
around a ten-acre lot.”
“Feeling his oats, yes,--that’s all right,” sniffed Ellis. “I suppose he
was feeling his oats when he captained his class eleven, and used to
curse the men out until everybody talked about it; that is, he cursed
out the men who were smaller than himself--if it wasn’t worth his while
to keep on the right side of them.”
“For Heaven’s sake shut up!” came from the other room, a trifle
impatiently.
“Aren’t we just a little harsh?” asked some one who had been listening
without joining in.
“Don’t repeat things like that about Sears, Johnny, even if you like to
believe them,” said Haydock, simply. Haydock always seemed a little
older--less haphazard in his words--than his contemporaries, and never
so much so as when repressing what had once been a temper of the most
flaming kind. Ellis--limited, conscientious, uncompromising--created
countless occasions for such repression. He was a pale tissue of all the
virtues. His sobriety was the kind that drove men to the gutter; his
chastity lowered temperatures. Once at a small dinner he inadvertently
got drunk and became so austere that the fellows went home. To-night, in
running down a member of the club at the club, he had more than
irritated Haydock. And then--which in this instance was to the
point--the member had been Wolcott. As a matter of fact, Haydock liked
Wolcott as he liked very few people. But even if one wasn’t fond of The
Magnificent One, he thought, there were so many people all over the
college who spent a generous portion of their time in cursing him,--men
to whom “Sears Wolcott” was the eponym of snob, and purse-proud
arrogance,--that in not sticking up for him, or, at least, in not
knowing what was really fine in him, one missed a rare chance of judging
by standards other than those of Thomas, Richard, and Henry. Wolcott
was a snob, of course; but then he never denied the fact,--he even
volunteered the information at times. And there’s hope for that kind of
a snob, thought Haydock.
The club--which had a characteristic expression for almost every hour of
the day--was beginning to lose what Haydock always thought of as its
“just-after-dinner look.” The men had finished their coffee; some of
them strolled off to their rooms to grind; others hurried in town to the
theatre; two were playing cards rather solemnly in a corner; on the
divan, a worn-out athlete had fallen asleep over a comic paper. Haydock
finished his cigar and went across to his room in Claverly.
At ten o’clock,--Wolcott’s bedtime when in training,--Haydock lit a pipe
and knocked on The Magnificent One’s door at the other end of the long
corridor. His coming at that hour was such a matter of course, that the
door had been left hospitably unlatched as usual.
“How was the rowing to-day?” he asked. The question, also, was a matter
of course.
“Damned hard work!” Wolcott was leisurely undressing and dropping his
clothes wherever he happened to be when they came off. “About ten racing
starts, then down to the Basin and up to the Brighton abattoir and back.
I’m tired.”
“And just a dash peevish, I believe.” Haydock sat down on the floor, and
lit the shavings and kindling wood in the fireplace. Wolcott’s rooms
were always as fresh and cold as the weather permitted.
“Oh, Ellis is such a God awful fool,--I’d break his face if he was
bigger!” Wolcott looked at the fire a moment, and thoughtfully stroked
one of his bare arms. “I got this, to-night.” He took a letter from the
mantelpiece and dropped it into Haydock’s lap. Haydock read it while The
Magnificent One got into his pyjamas before the fire. The letter had
nothing whatever to do with Ellis. Not that Haydock supposed it had;
logical sequence in any two of Wolcott’s remarks always surprised him.
It was a tactfully worded appeal from Barrows, the Recording Secretary,
telling, with simple realism that somehow or other stayed by one after
the letter was back in its envelope, of a fine, keen, scholarly fellow
in the sophomore class who had been found, literally starving, a stone’s
throw from the College Yard.
“What do you think, Boy?” asked Wolcott, indifferently.
“I wonder who it is,” mused Haydock.
The Secretary’s omission of the man’s name hadn’t interested Wolcott in
the least.
“Why didn’t he keep away, damn his soul?” he said.
“Well, he’s here,--that’s the main thing.”
“And Barrows wants me to give him a yacht and some polo ponies, and keep
him in cigars and golf sticks.”
Haydock made an inarticulate sound of assent between puffs. He knew
perfectly well that Wolcott wanted his advice, that in his
characteristic way he was asking it. He also knew, for his liking was an
intelligent one, how to give it.
“Well, I call it pretty nervy,” grumbled Sears.
“Oh, yes--yes--it’s nervy.” One simply had to agree with Wolcott in all
minor points in order to get anywhere.
“I don’t like to have my leg pulled any more than anybody else does.”
“No, I shouldn’t think you would. But I imagine they’d have difficulty
if they tried to play any little games like that with you,” Haydock
added, confidently.
No one objects to being talked to this way by a slightly older person
who is no fool himself.
“I’d like to see them try!” growled the other.
“They know better.”
“What do you call that, then?” Wolcott pointed with his toe to the
letter in Haydock’s lap.
“Oh--that!” Haydock’s manner was most off-hand, “that’s merely the
penalty of prominence and wealth. It’s tiresome, of course, this having
to come up to the scratch all your life. You know--sometimes I’m mighty
glad I’m not so powerful as you are--not in a position to do as much for
people, because I think--of course you never can tell--but I think I’d
be the kind of person to try to do it every now and then.”
“This sort of thing would be perfect fruit for you, wouldn’t it?”
“I’m inclined to think the poor devil would stop starving for a while.”
“How much would you give him, old Haystack, if you weren’t such a dirty
beggar yourself?” After absorbing a certain amount of Haydock’s
flattery, Wolcott always began to radiate a sort of bantering
amiability.
“Who--I? Oh, I don’t know! You can’t very well send fifteen or twenty
dollars, and let it go at that, I suppose; that’s too easy. I’d fix up
some scheme with the Secretary,--he knows all about that kind of
thing,--and keep the creature going; pay on the instalment plan for
thirty or forty years,” he laughed, “you know, the way people do when
they buy a piano or a set of Kipling--or any old thing.”
This was about as far as Haydock dared to go. He often wondered how
Wolcott could be induced to interest himself in something along the
lines suggested by Barrows, the Secretary; it was the incalculable
benefit such an interest would be to Wolcott that made him wish it; and
he had, as often, given the problem up. For Wolcott took the initiative
in nothing; he never had known the necessity that compels one to. The
only effort he was ever called on to make was that of selection. It
seemed as if everything in the world--the Secretary’s letter
included--came tumbling to crave approval at the boy’s feet. And he
approved of so little--least of all, of the people (Ellis was one of
them) who butted their heads against the mighty wall of his prejudices.
Haydock, who, perhaps, knew him better than any one did, was
occasionally nimble enough to clamber over the barrier. When he failed,
he consoled himself with the thought that, unlike Ellis and some others,
his head was still intact. For, in an odd sort of way that suggested the
congeniality of mind and matter, the two were excellent friends.
“Well, ‘I must go to bed and get strong for dear old Harvard,’”
announced Wolcott, abruptly. He had once read that sentence in a college
story, and had quoted it, with intense amusement, every night since.
Haydock leaned against the doorway, while The Magnificent One slid into
bed.
“Bed’s a good place, isn’t it?” said Wolcott, cuddling his sunburnt
face in the pillow. “Oh, Haystack,--I want to get up at seven,--leave a
note on my boots as you go out.”
“Have you found any one yet to tutor you in History 19?” asked Haydock,
from the other room, where he was scribbling a notice for the janitor.
“Yes, I start in to-morrow.”
“I didn’t know anybody was tutoring in that course this year. Who did
you get?”
“I don’t know his name. Oh, yes, I do, too. He’s a freak named McGaw;
wears a black cutaway coat with braid round the edge, and looks nervous.
Good-night, old Haystack. Don’t forget the lights.”
Before Haydock made the room dark, he took the Secretary’s letter from
the mantelpiece, and put it on Wolcott’s desk, where it could not very
well be overlooked.
II