reach the type of student to which McGaw belonged; McGaw knew nothing of
them. He had not gone to college to drift with the stream. He was there,
primarily, to acquire information along certain lines laid out in the
curriculum, incidentally to fight hunger and cold and darkness. If he
could be “sandy” and healthy and lucky enough to stick it out for four
years, he would have, at the end, concealed somewhere about his person,
that distinction (of many differences),--a college education. “Sand” he
had,--an incredible amount of it. But the trait had bid fair to destroy
his health before it discovered his luck. For to stay where he was at
all, and slave with his mind, often obliged him first to exhaust and
stultify himself with the manual labour of a lout. He had taken care of
furnace fires, cleaned cellars and backyards, shovelled snow, and cut
grass, until these varied avocations, together with the remarkable work
he did in his studies, and the farcical meals he cooked himself, broke
him down and sent him in a semi-hysterical, wholly pitiful state to the
kindly Barrows. And Barrows, convinced that he did not belong to the
many “grinds,”--of such admirable purpose and tragic mediocrity,--who
made the Secretary’s office one of constant anguish, hit upon an
inspiration. Of late, it had seemed positively Heaven-sent. Wolcott had
come to him, and said, in a manner that combined a child’s shyness with
the omnipotence of a crowned head who believes in the divine right of
kings, “I wish you would tell me just what I’m to do for this man you
wrote me about.” Barrows was gratified, amused, and, perhaps, a trifle
worried. His half hour with Sears, like a good deal of the time spent in
The Magnificent One’s company, rather baffled the Secretary. Wolcott’s
method of doing charity was in itself extraordinary. Furthermore, as far
as Barrows could see,--and he was keen,--there was no particular motive
for the act. Compassion was lacking; what little Sears said was
impersonal, almost cold. Vanity, smug self-appreciation, there was
none; the fellow neither enjoined theatrical conditions of secrecy, nor
showed ill-concealed eagerness to shine his light before men. The
personal equation was eliminated. Wolcott indicated nothing but a
princely willingness to undertake and carry out whatever the situation
required. As a matter of temporary convenience, he told Barrows he
preferred sending the man a monthly allowance, to giving any particular
sum at the start.
“Tell him to spend his money and--and eat things,” was perhaps his most
specific suggestion.
Haydock, of course, was deeply interested in his quiet fashion. Sears
told him the bald facts in a casual, indifferent way one afternoon when
he was changing his clothes to row. The interview with the Secretary,
Haydock was forced to reconstruct as best he could.
“Are you going to keep it up right along?” he asked, sceptically.
“Why not?” Sears’s tone implied the usual chip on his shoulder.
“Well, it’s very good of you,” commented the other, with almost
imperceptible exaggeration.
“Oh, hell!--now you’re giving me the geehee; I can tell that even if I
can’t write anonymous sonnets for the ‘Monthly.’” He gave Haydock one of
his athletic tributes of affection. “You know there’s nothing good about
it. What difference does it make?”
Yet in spite of Wolcott’s characteristic attitude to his indigent
unknown,--it was equivalent, briefly, to a shrug of the shoulders,--the
two dropped into the habit of talking together about him. They referred
to him after a time as “It,” or “Crœsus,” or “The Bloated Bondholder;”
and one of Wolcott’s favourite amusements was to describe in detail,
with an idiotic brilliancy of invention that Haydock had never given him
credit for, what “It” was doing at that particular moment.
“‘It’ must be dressing for dinner, don’t you think?” Sears would ask,
apropos of nothing at all.
“Oh, do you think so,--at six o’clock?” Haydock would take out his
watch, and deliberate seriously, “You see he dines at eight, probably,
and that gives him just time to get away from the Somerset and take in
the last few numbers at the ‘Pop’ Concert.”
“Yes,--he won’t care for long dinners this warm weather,” Sears would
add; “some clams, a clear soup, a bird, a truffle or two, salad perhaps;
all a man really needs of course, but nothing heavy or elaborate.”
Or again: “‘It’ had better hurry up and put that boat of his into
commission if he wants to get to Poughkeepsie for the race.”
“Will he go round with her?” Haydock would consider doubtfully.
“Oh, dear, no; he’ll take his car and meet her there. That sailing
master of his is a capital man,--perfectly invaluable he’s been to
Crœsus. You remember that spring on the Mediterranean?”
“Oh, yes, yes, of course, that time!”
After some such elaborate bit of fooling, Wolcott would roll on the
floor in paroxysms of mirth. And all the while McGaw and Wolcott were
spending several hours a week in the same room, translating from the
same page. Once when Haydock tiptoed in during a seminar to borrow
something, Sears glanced up from the Latin Documents and said:
“Crœsus has had a mighty pretty lot of ponies sent up from Virginia,”
and Haydock had answered, as he rummaged through the desk:--
“Good work,--I’ll have to look them over.”
Long practice had perfected the technique of their little game; its
suggestion of mindless opulence was maddening to McGaw. He had very
bitter feelings sometimes. Of late they had all come to an intense sort
of focus upon Sears. For in him McGaw was able to detect every human
attribute that he especially hated. Sears, on the other hand, though
naturally inclined to regard the tutor as a serviceable, if unsightly,
machine, became used to his high-strung, underfed personality. He would
talk to him now and then, when the effort of concentration became
impossible, ask his opinion of certain instructors and their
courses,--whether this one was a “snap,” and that one a “stinker,”--what
sort of frills he, McGaw, was going to get on his degree, and if he
didn’t think the college was “a good deal of a fake, anyhow?” This sort
of thing was infinitely more galling to McGaw than a business relation,
pure and simple. He remembered that, with other men who interrupted the
study hour from time to time, Wolcott talked rowing or horses or--what
was even more bewildering--nothing at all, but fooled and laughed with
easy intimacy. He resented Sears’s ponderous adaptability to his, the
tutor’s, own special topics.
While these two were seeing so much of each other on this uneven basis,
May came and went, bringing with it the Class Races and all the other
spring novelties. Wolcott’s crew came in second in the race, with seven
men in the boat. Some one had broken an oar, or a leg, or an
outrigger,--some one always does,--and jumped overboard. So the order in
which the four crews splashed over the finish line was, as usual, a
tremendous surprise to the black crowd that stretched along the Harvard
Bridge, and the sea wall, and the stable roofs back of Beacon Street.
Everybody--especially the girls--said the man who jumped was a great,
splendid fellow. He was, of course; but the crews and the man himself
laughed a good deal when they heard it; they thought that the men who
had to stay by a disabled boat and be beaten by half a length showed
their sand.
One sweltering day in June, after the examinations had begun, Haydock
found Sears in his room, staring helplessly at a small mountain of
clothing that reared itself in chaos from his study floor. “What’ll I
do?” he asked, mopping his face dejectedly with the tail of a coloured
shirt.
“Why, what’s the matter with them?” Haydock turned over a gay straw hat
with his foot.
“Oh, everything!” answered Sears; he was warm and cross. “They don’t
fit, and they’re hideous, and no good, and in my way, and they make me
sick.” He gave the pile a kick that spread it the length of the room.
“Why not let Crœsus have a whack at them?” suggested Haydock,
thoughtfully.
“What!” Wolcott looked quizzical, astonished. “Oh, that would never do,
Boy! It would be rotten for one college fellow to offer another one
clothes.”
“I don’t see much difference between that and money.”
“Well, there is a difference, just the same. The money comes through the
Secretary,--a sort of reward offered, and no questions asked. Anyhow,
there’s something about money--something--Oh, you know what it is as
well as I do! As soon as money belongs to you, it’s just as good as
anybody’s.”
“Rather better, I should say.”
“Well, clothes aren’t.”
“Since you press me,” said Haydock, fishing among a heap of crumpled
linen, “I feel obliged to possess myself of this extremely pretty
necktie.” He smoothed a brilliant strip of crimson silk over his knee.
“Go on, Haystack,--what shall I do with them?”
“How many times does a simple statement have to be repeated to you
before it penetrates?” Haydock rapidly began to bring a rough kind of
order into the waste of shirts, neckties, odd gloves, and suits of
clothes.
“Give them to Crœsus? That’s out of the question, me boy!”
Haydock worked hard a few moments in silence. Then he stood up, hot and
dishevelled, but amiable, as he always was, and said, laughing:--
“That light grey suit, these shirts, those neckties, and this hat, in
fact the best of this out-fit, is going this afternoon to Barrows, with
a note from you. They will subsequently be presented to ‘It, Croœsus,
Esquire.’” It amused Wolcott every now and then to have Haydock “boss”
him. The clothes went, of course.
Two days later they returned. That is to say, the best of them did,--the
grey suit, the coloured shirt, the straw hat, and one of the quieter
neckties. Ernest McGaw, unspeakably jaunty, almost handsome, was inside
of them.
Even before Wolcott’s bundle had enabled McGaw to blossom, like the
season, into fine raiment, his whole appearance had undergone a subtle,
indescribable change. Perhaps it was a recently acquired firmness of
gait as he swung through the Yard to a lecture, or up the steps of
Claverly to Sears’s room. Hitherto he had hated the approach to
Claverly; there usually were men going in or coming out, who looked at
him as they passed. Once he had found a whole group of them seated on
the steps, and had walked twice round the block, rather than brush
through to the door. Or it may have been the spiritual radiance that
comes of good food and plenty of it, money in your pocket, and peace in
your mind. At any rate, McGaw’s expression, whether it walked at you, or
looked at you, or smiled at you, had, of late, become the outward and
visible sign of a great inward happiness. Almost every minute of his day
was dedicated to his work; yet he felt as if he were having for the
first time leisure in which to breathe. By no means the least exquisite
of his satisfactions was his first purchase of something unnecessary, a
luxury, an extravagance; he bought one evening, in a dim musty corner of
a Brattle Square bookstall, a second-hand copy of some Latin hymns for
twenty cents. The demi-god who had caused such things to be--Barrows had
spoken vaguely of “a friend”--had become to McGaw the occasion of the
sun’s rising and the stars’ shining; through him, the earth revolved,
and the college endured. McGaw was very religious; every night he prayed
fervently for the man who was befriending him. To-day, when he left his
room to walk down to Claverly, he had the uplifting glow of self-respect
and good-will to men whose secret only barbers and tailors seem to know.
Perhaps, just at first, he felt even more like a white elephant than one
ordinarily does on getting into a fresh suit of grey, after wearing
black for many months. But the sensation, coming as it did from the
knowledge that he was conspicuously better, rather than worse dressed
than most people, was not altogether an unpleasant one to McGaw.
Wolcott’s back was turned when he arrived. This fact made what followed
even more unfortunate than it would have been had the somewhat
astounding truth burst on Sears at the moment the tutor came into the
room. For it enabled Wolcott to say, in his natural, off-hand tones,
without looking away from his desk:
“Is that you, McGaw? Just sit down and wait a minute.” When his
revolving chair finally did swing round, the transition was something
very awful. Sears, in spite of his birth, and his bringing up, and his
money, was, at times, to put it kindly, exceedingly “near to nature;”
just now he behaved as one might fancy a naked Zulu behaving were an
electric car or a steam-roller to dart suddenly across his path in the
depths of an African jungle. He jerked back as if somebody had made a
lunge at him, and held on to the arms of his chair. Then he looked
quickly from side to side, at the door and windows, with his mouth open
stupidly. His eyes, round, rounder, helpless, turned again and again to
that dapper butterfly in the chair opposite, who got redder and redder
until all the blood in his body boiled through his face and away,
leaving him white, rigid, terrible. And Sears could make no sound, only
a gasping effort, until all at once the entire situation seemed to
gather fresh force and smite him anew. He stumbled from his chair,
through the door, down the long hall, down the stairs, laughing,
shrieking, cursing like a maniac, out into the street.
IV
Sears found Haydock studying at the club, and dragged him out of his
chair, upstairs to a vacant room, and shut the door. Then he paced the
floor like a caged lion, holding his hands to his head and exclaiming,
whenever he could stop laughing long enough, that he had lost his mind.
Every now and then, when words refused to come, he expressed himself by
leaning against the wall, with his back to Haydock, and kicking the air
behind him. Sometimes he pounded the door with his clenched fist.
Haydock waited.
“I’ll never get over this,” Sears declared, “not if I live to be a
hundred.”
“Well, don’t tell it backwards,” objected Haydock; “begin at the
beginning.”
“There isn’t any beginning,” roared Sears; “it never began, I just
looked around and found it there; it had been there all the time;
you’ve seen it yourself.” He sat on the floor and rocked to and fro.
“I’m almost inclined to believe that you _have_ lost your mind,”
remarked Haydock.
“Just wait, just wait! You’ll be a gibbering idiot yourself when I tell
you, only you’ll not believe me! You can’t believe me! I don’t believe
it myself! Oh, if you’d only been there!--if you could have seen him! I
was writing a letter at my desk when he came in, and told him to sit
down. I didn’t even notice him, or what he had on, or anything; and when
I turned around--when I turned around--” Wolcott gasped--“when I turned
around, I thought it would be McGaw!”
“Oh, go on, who was it?”
“It _was_ McGaw! I’ll never get over the shock of it.” Haydock wrinkled
his forehead at this clew.
“Can’t you guess? Don’t you know? Doesn’t something tell you? Try, try!
think of the only person in college he could be, if he weren’t himself.
Think of the only way I could have found out, the thing that made the
difference--the--”
“He isn’t--he isn’t?”--Haydock stuffed his fingers in his ears and
shrieked.
“He is, he is!” bellowed Sears. Then they both yelled, and made such a
noise that the fellows downstairs came running up to see what was going
on.
But they didn’t tell them. They couldn’t, in the first place, and the
fellows wouldn’t have understood if they had. The McGaw-Crœsus episode
was one of those little interpolated experiences two people own together
so completely that they can’t share it if they want to. This one
happened to be the kind over which the partners could laugh. When it
happens the other way,--when two people get together and cry,--it isn’t
nearly as valuable a factor in the divine accident of friendship; there
is always one of them who very selfishly does most of the crying. For a
time there was only mirth over McGaw. It was natural enough that Wolcott
should have but a one-sided appreciation of the affair; _he_ had made a
discovery, _he_ had been surprised, _he_ had found it very startling
and absurd. It was not to be expected that he would stop laughing to
consider McGaw’s feelings in the matter. And Haydock, who was usually
thoughtful and considerate, treated the revelation as he did at first,
because it had come to him through Wolcott’s eyes. Only when his
interest in detail prompted him to ask questions, did he begin to
reconstruct the scene in Wolcott’s room, and feel intensely sorry for
McGaw.
“What did you say when you turned around and first saw the clothes?” he
asked Wolcott.
“Say? I didn’t say anything, I just looked, and wondered if the exams
had gone to my brain.”
“Didn’t he do anything?”
“Why, of course not; what did you suppose he’d do? Tell me that he’d
changed his shirt? I could see that for myself; heaven knows I almost
dropped dead!”
“Well, you certainly didn’t just sit there staring at the man, did you?”
“Sit there? If I’d sat there another second, I’d have yelled in his
face. I crashed out of the room and exploded in the hall. I came over
here to find you.”
“Do you mean to say he’s in your room yet, waiting?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,--I wouldn’t go back to look for gold and
precious stones.”
“What do you suppose he thought?”
“Lord, I don’t know,--I don’t care what he thought! What do you suppose
I thought?” Wolcott laughed.
“But if you ran out of your room that way, and laughed in the hall, as
you say you did, he must have known you were laughing at him,” said
Haydock, gravely.
“Why certainly he did! I don’t suppose the creature thought I was
throwing a fit like that just for exercise. What difference does it make
anyhow?” Sears went on indifferently. “I’ll never see him again.
To-day’s the last time he was coming to tutor me,--‘the exam’ is
to-morrow; I’ll send him a cheque for what I owe him, and there you
are.”
“But he must have thought you were laughing at him because he was
dressed up,” persisted Haydock.
“Well, damn it, I was! If he hadn’t come looking as fine as a drunken
shoemaker in my old clothes, I never should have known!” McGaw’s
emotions didn’t contribute in any way to Wolcott’s enjoyment of his
discovery,--why should Haydock branch off and make such a tiresome point
of them!
“It’s too bad you offended him that way,” Haydock reflected; “for of
course he must be frightfully offended. He’s utterly in the dark about
the thing,--he wouldn’t have worn the clothes to your room if he
weren’t; and he just thinks he looks like an overdressed fool in them.
He’ll go home and take them off, and never wear them again.”
“Then he certainly will be a fool,” answered Wolcott, a trifle sulkily.
“He looked extremely nice in them. If I’d known how well they looked on,
I shouldn’t have given them away.” He spoke as if he were perfectly
insensitive to McGaw’s probable anger and mortification; but Haydock
knew that he wasn’t.
“It’s funny, of course; but I’m mighty sorry it happened.” The more
Haydock thought of the way Sears had behaved, the more it worried him.
“You can insult your friends without its making any particular
difference, I suppose; they either refuse to take you seriously, or
insult back, just as they please. But McGaw’s different,--he’s a
defenceless, pathetic sort of a creature, and tremendously sensitive; I
could see that whenever I met him in your room. He’s the kind of fellow
that makes you feel that ‘something ought to be done about it.’”
“I think I have done a little,” suggested Wolcott, embarrassed at
referring to his own good works, yet desirous of defending himself.
“It doesn’t put you in a better light with McGaw though; and his
feelings aren’t any the less hurt on that account. All he thinks is,
that he made a ridiculous exhibition of himself in somebody else’s
clothes, and that you were coarse and heartless about it.”
“I’m afraid you flatter me,” muttered Wolcott.
“Come, now, Searsy, you know, just as well as I do, how people feel when
you laugh at them.”
The Magnificent One’s laugh, when exerted upon certain temperaments,
was indeed a terrifically effective engine. Wolcott’s sense of ridicule
was not fine; it was powerless to discover the one vulnerable spot and
stab neatly. But if it couldn’t dissect, it could crush like a boulder
toppling from a precipice. “Remember poor little Bemis!” Wolcott
coloured; he had once bet that he could make little Bemis cry inside of
fifteen minutes, without touching him. That he had won the bet in eleven
minutes and six seconds was a success of which he was not very proud.
“This isn’t as bad as that time,” Haydock went on; “because you didn’t
do it on purpose.”
“It was beastly, though,--wasn’t it?” said Wolcott, slowly, after a
moment. He got up and looked out of the window, while Haydock sat and
smoked in silence. “Well, for heaven’s sake, let’s not talk about it any
more,” he said at length, turning around. “If you can think of anything
that I ought to go and do about it, tell me, and I’ll do it.” He left
the room, and, in a minute or two, Haydock heard the front door slam
behind him.
“What to do?” thought Haydock. The occasions that would have made his
interference in the matter anything but an elaborate bit of patronising,
were lacking. Haydock never saw McGaw in the ordinary course of events.
To explain things, he would have had to seek him out, and begin in a way
that would have sounded to the tutor like: “See here, my good
man,”--that of course would hardly do. Besides, if amends were in order,
Sears was the proper person to make them. The conception of Sears
apologising to McGaw was sublime; Sears actually apologising,--Haydock
imagined him setting his teeth, and blurting out the fewest possible
words in which he could frame a perfunctory sentence of regret. That
wouldn’t do, either. Haydock, usually full of resource when it came to
rectifying other people’s mistakes--he made very few himself--was quite
at a loss in this instance. He ended by telling himself that what he
cared most about, after all, was that Wolcott should feel genuinely
uncomfortable; for the good of his soul he oughtn’t to be allowed to
jeer at a man and then abandon him to his bitter reflections, without
being talked to by some one. Wolcott had shown that he was “sorry,” as
plainly as he ever condescended to express that state of mind. The
sensible course, perhaps, was to forget the rest as soon as possible.
This Haydock attempted to do.
But it was far from easy. He and Wolcott went abroad together that year.
Wolcott wanted to divide the summer between Dinard and Paris. Haydock
had long wished to take a bicycle trip among a lot of Italian towns
that, as Wolcott told him, no one but he “and another know-it-all who
wrote a guide-book about them ever heard of before.” They compromised on
the Italian towns. All through the long vacation McGaw, and what Haydock
believed to be the type he represented, intruded upon Haydock’s
meditations at the oddest hours and in the most unlikely places. For the
first time he understood something a man had said to him the summer
before:--
“Why on earth are you going to spend your vacation in central Siberia?”
Haydock had asked him.
“Because I want to find out what I really think about Harvard,” the man
had answered, laughing. It wasn’t exactly necessary for Haydock to go to
Italy in order to think; but when, in August, he found himself loafing
with Wolcott through a chain of dead little towns that some one had
strewn along the hills and forgotten, he was able to discuss with
himself,--and occasionally with his companion,--as he never had been
before, more than one aspect of life in another little town that, had he
known it, is quite as dead in August as any mediæval hamlet of the
Apennines. The discussions were intensely serious, unsatisfactory, and
in no way markworthy, except that they concerned themselves with Ernest
McGaw in particular, and a background of shadowy strugglers Haydock and
Wolcott didn’t know much about, that they referred to conveniently as
“McGaws in general.” They were unable to dismiss the tutor from their
minds; and when college opened again, McGaw was dazed one fine morning
in November on seeing his own name on the first page of the “Crimson”
among six other names--some of them well known--that, together with his,
the “Crimson” announced, composed the Second Seven of the Signet.
It had been Wolcott’s suggestion entirely. He wasn’t a Signet man
himself; but Haydock was, “which is practically the same thing,” as
Wolcott said when he asked him to do what he could for McGaw. The plan
of electing McGaw to the Signet had been such a simple matter for
Haydock to carry out, that he couldn’t scare up a suspicion of the smug
satisfaction he had always believed was the reward of having gone out of
one’s way to do some one a good turn. Even when Wolcott came to him with
the “Crimson” in one hand, and patted him on the head with the other,
saying: “You--are--a--good--boy,” he didn’t have any of the nice
priggish sensations he had been looking forward to investigating.
“No, I’m not,” he said to Wolcott. “It was too easy.”
“How did you manage it?”
“There wasn’t much need of management,” answered Haydock. “The First
Seven is so dazzled by its own general brilliancy that it firmly
believes that when it was elected, the list of really interesting men in
the class was exhausted. So it goes in for proposing its personal
friends who are congenial, without being ‘clever’ and ‘literary;’ and
as nobody will vote for anybody else’s friends, they all get tired of
black-balling people after a while, and compromise on some obscure and
very deserving person none of them know at all. It was when everybody
was tired of fighting, that I bucked in McGaw. I said he was a
scholar,--he must be if he’s able to make you pass examinations; and I
said that we would be keeping up the Signet’s tradition of electing
representative men, if we got him in; and that the Faculty would like
it; and that McGaw would give just the necessary tone of seriousness to
the Signet that I feared we of the First Seven lacked. I said that,
because people are always tickled to death to think they belong to
something very serious, without being serious themselves. It was the
speech of my life, I assure you. McGaw was elected, on the second
ballot, without a murmur.”
“You’ll have to make him an honorary member, won’t you? Can he pay his
initiation fee?” Wolcott asked, with elaborate innocence. Haydock
answered by unbuttoning Wolcott’s coat and finding ten dollars in his
card-case.