Crœsus can have the satisfaction of paying it himself.” He led Sears by
the coat to a desk, and dipped a pen in the ink.
“This highway robbery game is a perfect damned outrage!” said The
Magnificent One, as he took the pen and began to write.
McGaw was bewildered and charmed at his election, for it is a great
honour to belong to the Signet, although no one--especially the
twenty-one members of the distinguished junior society--knows just why.
He was also considerably upset by his unexpected translation; it
demolished an entire system of dreary philosophy that he had built out
of the struggles and bitterness of his freshman and sophomore years. He
couldn’t, logically, go on thinking himself an obscure outcast, shut off
from human interests, since he had become so pleasantly conspicuous in
the public eye. Some unseen, unknown power had wished him well, and had
done much for him; McGaw was happy, grateful, and, at first, mystified.
But when the extra ten dollars for his initiation fee came through
Barrows, he considered the mystery solved. He prayed enthusiastically
that night--a great deal more than ten dollars’ worth--for the hallowed
being whose goodness was unfathomable. He also laid awake an hour
thinking up a suitable subject for his initiation “part.” Nothing that
occurred to him seemed deep enough for so intellectual an institution as
the Signet.
On the evening the Second Seven was initiated, Haydock--who developed an
oppressive sense of responsibility for McGaw five or ten minutes before
the fellow stood up to read his part--felt rather proud of him. McGaw’s
turn came between a humourous effort in feeble rhyme, and a narrative
that the writer sought to disinfect,--when he became aware that there
were several instructors among his audience,--by explaining
apologetically, that it was “from the French.” McGaw’s part was a
dissertation on “The Vocabulary of Æschylus.”
“I was glad he did it,” Haydock said to Wolcott, when telling him about
the initiation later in the evening at the club; “because I’d blathered
so much about his being serious and a scholar. Why it was
wonderful--monumental! Nobody understood a word of it, after the first
page, and there were twenty-three pages. I counted them; I had to look
interested in something. If there’s a solitary iota subscript in Athens
this night that didn’t get ripped up the back and disembowelled, I’d
like to shake hands with it, and ask it how it escaped. Professor Tenny
went over to him afterwards; they had a lemonade orgy together and made
Greek puns. McGaw had the grey suit on; he’s really a rather
fine-looking sort of a chap; he doesn’t seem peaked and sticky out at
the sleeves the way he used to be. All the fellows wooded up in great
style; I’d given Ellis a long talk to death beforehand, and told him the
whole thing,”--Wolcott made a face. “Oh, you don’t mind! Ellis is just
the kind to think it sort of nice and Godsome. In fact, Ellis told me he
was afraid he’d always misjudged you, and asked me what he’d better do
about it.” They both laughed. “It’s funny,” Haydock went on, “the way
fellows are willing to accept a man here if only you can get the right
people to hustle around and say that he’s ‘somebody.’ I was thinking
that to-night. Not one of those fellows had ever heard of McGaw until I
sprung him on them; and Ellis went around telling everybody he had ‘a
future before him,’--whatever that means. Ellis is perfectly happy, you
know, when he can persuade himself that some one he has just met has a
future before him. He thought I had, for about two weeks once. Well,
what I began to say was that, in a small way, McGaw is right in the
thick of things now. There’s no reason why those fellows shouldn’t like
him; he seems really human in spite of Æschylus; and if they do take to
him, he’ll probably make the O. K. and the Pudding, and wind up by being
Class Day Orator. When I left, he was talking to that detestable snob,
Baxford. Heaven only knows what they found to talk about; but Baxford
was cackling his mindless cackle. They seemed to have plenty to say to
each other; I didn’t disturb them. Isn’t it funny?”
It was “funny” to Haydock and Wolcott, although Wolcott, perhaps,
wouldn’t have found it out by himself. When, a short time afterwards,
the Editor-in-chief of the “Monthly” begged permission to print “The
Vocabulary of Æschylus,” and the “Crimson” called it “a remarkably
distinguished bit of research,” and the Signet remarked that real merit
always found its level, Haydock and Wolcott got together and laughed,
and were “just too cynical for anything,” as Ellis said, reprovingly.
They laughed, too, when they met McGaw in the Yard or the
Square,--somehow he had become a more familiar figure in the college
scene,--and spoke to him. McGaw always had a cordial “hello” for Haydock
alone. To Haydock and Wolcott together, he gave a somewhat stiff nod.
Wolcott, unaccompanied, he ignored.
“That young man will succeed,” said Wolcott, one morning after he had
been given--as he explained to Haydock--“the frozen eye twice, in front
of Foster’s.”
“Any one who can afford to make a point of cutting you has succeeded,”
laughed Haydock. McGaw’s independence and “cheek” pleased them both
exceedingly.
Haydock had some foundation for his remark. McGaw was prosperous; he was
happy; to many of his classmates, he had become something of a
personage. He followed “The Vocabulary of Æschylus” in the “Monthly” by
“Life and the Classics,” and “Hellas and the Athletic Question” in the
“Advocate,”--two intelligent essays that were happy in creating varied
opinions among the readers of the college papers, and in causing his
name to be added very soon to the list of the “Monthly’s” editors. There
are few institutions in college through which one’s tether, so to speak,
can be more indefinitely extended than through the Signet and the
college press. McGaw’s acquaintance became large and eclectic. It
brought him work,--tutoring of all kinds,--more than he could undertake.
It gave him an interest in college activities, and an intimate knowledge
of them that enabled him to supply several Sunday newspapers with
columns of unimportant but lucrative information and journalistic
rigmarole. It made it possible for him at length to return to Barrows
one of the periodical remittances and something additional, in payment
of what he preferred to consider his debt. Barrows gave Wolcott, and
Wolcott gave Haydock, and Haydock gave Wolcott’s sister the note that
went with it. Between the lines they all read the fine feeling that
McGaw, with even finer feeling, had delicately suggested. McGaw was
nearing the crest of the wave. The grinds of the class, in discussing
him, conceded to him a dubious facility for getting high marks in his
studies, and a somewhat frivolous knack of impressing people favourably.
But they agreed that, at last analysis, he lacked the instincts of a
true scholar. The other men told one another that he was “a terrible
grind, but a darned nice fellow!”--which was another way of saying he
was “really human, in spite of Æschylus.”
Haydock had taken the fellow’s measure when he said that of him. The
tutor was thoroughly “human.” He was inclined to like most of the men he
had met at the Signet in a frank, simple way that demanded nothing, and
ended by getting much; with corresponding naturalness, he liked being
liked by them. Moreover, the dreariness of his first two years left no
more permanent effect on him than the horrors of a January passage leave
on a traveller who at length reaches port. McGaw proved himself a normal
young person, by the comfortable manner in which the general
hopelessness of his past situation receded from his memory, and left
behind it one or two sharp details of a purely personal nature. He
didn’t, for instance, recall very vividly how it felt to go more or less
hungry for several days at a time; but, on the other hand, he couldn’t
pass Wolcott on the street without tingling all over with anger and
contempt. The recollection of Wolcott’s treatment of him refused to
soften and fade; the sound of Wolcott’s insolent laughter never grew
faint. McGaw still felt bitterly toward Wolcott. The tutor was human
enough; and he hadn’t begun to show how human he could be. He was
something like the little girl who, on being told that she had big eyes,
answered, “Well, if you think they’re big now, you just ought to see me
open them really wide once.” Whenever McGaw came across Wolcott, he
thought of a remark a certain terrible old man used to make to his
enemies:--
“You’ll all have a chance to get back at me if you live long enough,”
this terrible old man was in the habit of saying encouragingly. “The
only trouble is, so many of you seem to die at seventy.” McGaw often
hoped that he wouldn’t be cut off at that age without having had a slap
of some kind at Wolcott. So, although he didn’t exactly seek an
opportunity, he was by no means blind to it when it presented itself,
which it did with gratifying despatch.
There was the usual delay that year in electing the third and last seven
of the Signet. The first two sevens had met three or four times,
ostensibly for that purpose; but either there wasn’t a quorum, or some
one had always played the piano, or read Kipling, or Maupassant, or
Catulle Mendes aloud, or given a lively rendering of the dramas then
playing at the Bowdoin Square Theatre, or the Grand Opera House, until
no one felt particularly business-like. It was pleasanter to drink beer,
and smoke, and “listen to something,” than to squabble over seven men
far into the night, until you began to yawn, and discovered that you
didn’t care whether they or any one else ever got into the Signet. As
time went on, Ellis and Haviland, the president, made several attempts
to impress upon the society what Ellis called, “the gravity of the
situation.” But almost every one knew the president too well to be in
the least impressed, and Ellis’s gravity was never very infectious; so
the Signet took its own time. When, at last, fourteen men turned up in
the long, dingy room of the society one rainy night in May, and no one
had brought anything to read, and the fellows who played the piano were
disobliging, Haviland called them to order, at the earnest request of
Ellis, secretary and treasurer, and declared that the first business to
come before the meeting was the election of the Third Seven. Ellis
looked conscious and aggrieved; he had written several pages of minutes
in rhyme, and wanted to read them.
“You look rather well behind that desk, Haviland,” drawled a fellow
named Baxford; “but you make a rotten president. The first business is
the reading of the minutes.” Ellis smiled again.
“Not at all, not at all,” answered Haviland, unabashed, glancing at the
secretary’s book; “I am only too well aware that Mr. Ellis has written a
yard and a half of poetry for the occasion. I merely hesitated to
classify so delightful a prospect under the head of business. If Mr.
Ellis will give us the _pleasure_--”
“I move we adjourn,” interrupted Haydock and Dickey Dawson and Bigelow
and a tall man every one called Tommy, all rising at once.
“I’m going to get a cup of chocolate,” announced some one else. “Ellis’s
poetry is always so sensual, I can’t listen to it unless I quaff thick,
sweet, ’lucent syrups tinct with’ granulated sugar.”
“Have the things come?” asked Haviland, abruptly dropping what he
considered his parliamentary manner.
“Yes, and there’s beer,” answered Baxford, who was sitting where he
could lift the faded red portière and look into the other room. The
meeting, led by the president, stampeded, leaving Ellis pounding on the
table, and endeavouring to make himself heard above the uproar. He was
imploring them to “be serious just for a few minutes.” Haydock stuck his
head between the curtains.
“That’s what they call ‘Harvard indifference,’” he said, and
disappeared.
They wasted, according to Ellis, three-quarters of an hour over beer and
chocolate, and wouldn’t have come to order again at all, if he hadn’t
begged them separately to do so as a personal favour to him. Then they
consumed almost as long again in interrupting the reading of the
minutes, to criticise gravely Ellis’s versification, to discuss his
“conception of life,” as based on his doggerel lines, and to call
attention, wherever poor Ellis had indulged in anything that bordered on
“fine” writing, to what Tommy referred to as, “Those subtle obscenities
the author has sought, with ghoulish depravity, to disguise in the
bombastic periods of a Milton or an Alfred Austin.” They moved that
Ellis be “expelled from the aristocracy of intellect, and sent to the
Annex, there to be kissed in the face until dead,” and refused to allow
the meeting to proceed until the motion had been put and lost by a
unanimous vote. Baxford created an inexpensive diversion by throwing a
pack of cards into the air, turning up his coat-collar, and exclaiming,
as they fell on his head:--
“B-r-r-r-r, how the storm rages without! Think, lads, of the poor
sailors on such a night!” Dawson set fire to the portières, because, as
he explained, Ellis had said something in his poem about a “lurid
glare,” and he wanted to see what they were like. The conflagration was
put out with beer, and Ellis was fined three dollars for “perverting
youth.” McGaw enjoyed the noise and fooling as much as any one. He
didn’t quite know how to stir up that sort of thing himself; but he was
no more anxious than the rest to get to the serious business of the
meeting.
It was late when they finally began to nominate the Third Seven. There
were in all sixteen names proposed. An informal vote was taken on
them,--“a sort of preliminary canter,” as Haviland said, “just to find
out what the general feeling was.” The ballots were playing-cards, cast
in Ellis’s hat (when, later in the evening, its brim was torn off
during a playful discussion, Ellis was fined another dollar for the
ensuing delay). Baxford’s room-mate, Anderson, was the first man voted
on.
“Although he isn’t just the sort of a man who would be chosen for the
first two sevens,” said Baxford, in his little speech just before the
hat was passed around, “he’s really a perfect corker. He doesn’t ‘do’
anything in particular; but I’ve known him a long time, and he’s the
most amusing sort of a chap, when he wants to be; and--and I think he’d
be a mighty good sort of a man to have on.”
Of the fourteen votes cast for Anderson, thirteen of them were black.
“As an indication of feeling,” remarked Tommy, “the informal ballot is
easily a success.”
“Not quite ‘in touch’ with the Signet, I’m afraid,” said Baxford,
good-naturedly. Some one moved to drop all names getting six or more
black balls, and this, after the first round, decreased the number of
candidates to nine. McGaw had put up a man named Carver, one of the
editors of the “Monthly.” The nomination was a discreet one, for Carver
was neither obscure nor very well known. He was the kind of person they
almost all dimly remembered having met at one time or another, in the
rooms of fellows they liked. This isn’t knowing much about a man; but,
at least, it isn’t knowing anything against him. Then McGaw’s manner of
indorsing him was distinctly good. He managed to give the impression of
having honestly picked out Carver, not because he was Carver’s friend,
but because he thought the Signet was on the lookout for that kind of
man. He seemed to wish, in a modest way, to please the Signet.
“I can’t say that I’ve known him very long, or well,” said McGaw,
thoughtfully (the others had made a point of having been more or less
born and brought up with their candidates); “but since I’ve been on the
‘Monthly,’ I’ve seen something of him. He’s a pleasant sort of a fellow,
and he writes pretty good stories every now and then; although I don’t
think he’s what you would call ‘literary’ exactly. He isn’t very
prominent; that might be an objection,” he went on, unconscious of the
implied flattery; “but I decided to put him up because I thought he
seemed like a good man, and that some of you who know of him might like
to consider him.”
“I know him,” spoke up Haydock, glad of a chance to help on McGaw’s
candidate. “I thought of him myself. He would fit in very well.” Ellis,
too, had a good word to say. Carver was then voted on.
“Fourteen red and no black,” announced Haviland from the desk. The crowd
clapped; and McGaw felt the little thrill born of an awakened sense of
importance and power in the community.
It took an hour and a half to elect the next four men,--an hour and a
half of eulogy, discussion, diplomacy, compromise,--although, as time
went on, the increasing indifference of the majority of the fellows as
to who got in tended to reduce the election here and there, among those
who really cared, to the process of voting “for your man, if you’ll vote
for mine.” Not that the arrangement did away with animated
electioneering in different corners of the room, and vehement arguments
that might never have ended had not some weary outsider called
attention to the fact that they had long since ceased to have any
bearing on anything. But it gave a coercive publicity to pigheadedness
in various quarters that made a Third Seven possible. At midnight, five
men had been elected, two places remained unfilled, and the list of
candidates numbered four. Then, by a curious revulsion of feeling no one
sought to explain, three of the names that had hung on with a fair
chance of success until that late hour, were unmercifully black-balled
in rapid succession and thrown out. This left but one candidate--a man
named Leonard--and two vacancies. The hat went around again bringing
back to the desk, among twelve other cards, the ace of spades and the
queen of clubs. Two black-balls, if persisted in, kept a man out of the
Signet.
“Now we’ll have to think up some one else. Oh, Lord!” yawned Haviland.
“Leonard has had two black for hours; I think he’s hopeless. Somebody
suggest somebody else.”
Ellis glanced at Haydock as much as to say, “Now’s your time.” He had
been doing that, off and on, all evening, until Haydock at last refused
to look in his direction. Haydock was on the point of attempting
something rather impossible, and he didn’t propose to ruin his chance of
success at the outset, merely by being ill-timed. He had decided a week
before,--as soon as the postal cards calling for an election were sent
out,--that he wanted Sears Wolcott on the Signet. His reasons for
getting Sears there were not obvious, and Haydock appreciated the
difficulties that lay in the way of making them appear so, or of giving
any reasons at all other than that he wanted him. His best motives for
wishing to “buck” Sears in were hardly formulated in his own mind; he
couldn’t very well undertake to make them clear to others, even if they
would have carried with them any weight,--which they wouldn’t have. He
was influenced wholly by the same feeling for Wolcott--a mixture of
admiration and fond disapproval--that had led him the year before to do
what he could to interest The Magnificent One in Barrows’s unfortunate.
The little experiment had done something for Wolcott,--a good that
perhaps only Haydock and Wolcott’s sister appreciated as yet, but
something that was, nevertheless, worth while. Wolcott’s horizon had
given a little here and there; Wolcott himself was somewhat less
intolerant; he had ceased noticeably, to Haydock at least, to be
actuated in everything he said and did by a kind of American adaptation
of the ante-French Revolutionary opinion, that human beings began with
barons. He was still a selfish high-handed youth,--no one knew it better
than Haydock. But his friend found him neither as egoistic nor as
arrogant as he had been; and he drew his own inferences. As for getting
Wolcott into the Signet--Haydock wished to go on with what he had begun.
The junior society seemed made to his hand. He not only looked forward
to throwing Wolcott and McGaw together again,--on a basis of equality,
this time,--he wished to put Wolcott in the way of having to see
something of fellows who had a variety of interests strikingly different
from his own, and who came together now and then to talk and read about
them. Wolcott came in contact with men of many tastes at his clubs; but
the club ideal was, after all, the placid, unimaginative ideal of
fifteen or twenty pleasant young men with plenty of money, it was only
too easy to live up to. Haydock had no misguided veneration for the
Signet as a learned or even a very clever institution; an undergraduate
literary society could hardly be one or the other. He did appreciate,
however, the curiously diverse character of its components, and the
semi-serious intellectual friction that went on there. For the good of
Wolcott alone, he hoped to get him on the Third Seven. The attitude was
quixotic, inasmuch as it was rather sentimental and as absurd as only a
thoroughly fine attitude can be. Haydock had talked several men into
promising to vote for Wolcott, should his name come up; and Ellis, from
a variety of strange Christian motives, had done the same. Ellis had
become enthusiastic over Wolcott since he had learned of the McGaw
affair; whereas, formerly, he had denounced him as a selfish beast, he
now called him a “temperament.”
“Do propose somebody--anybody,” repeated Haviland. “I’m so sleepy!” Two
of the men had stretched themselves on the sofas, with the request that
they be waked in time to vote.
“Let’s only have six on the Third Seven; it would be so quaint,”
suggested Tommy.
“I think I’d even vote for Baxford’s room-mate if he were put up again,”
said Dickey Dawson.
It was just this apparent willingness to elect any one and get away,
that Haydock had been waiting for. He stood up.
“I can’t think of any one who seems exactly cut out for the Signet, any
more than the rest of you can,” he said; “but I don’t see why that ought
to make so much difference on the Third Seven. Why not get on somebody
like Tony Wilson or Jack Linzee or Sears Wolcott,--not necessarily any
of those three, but some one like that. They’re athletes, you know, and
people outside will think we’re trying to be representative,--that
always sounds well, and, besides, they’re all good fellows. Any one of
those men would be surprised and pleased to be elected, I feel sure.”
“Yes,--they did that last year,” added Ellis. “Martin was a Signet man,
and he used to go to all the meetings and everything, and he was nothing
but an athloot. People laughed at first, but they thought it rather
nice. I’ll vote for any of those fellows.”
“Well, I nominate Sears Wolcott,” called some one from the sofa,--one of
the men who had pledged himself to Haydock. “I know him pretty well, and
shouldn’t mind seeing him in.”
“Buck him in,--buck him in!” said two or three others, impatiently.
“And whoever’s been black-balling Leonard all evening, for Heaven’s sake
don’t next time,” added Haviland.
Haydock was relieved that it hadn’t been necessary for him to nominate
Wolcott directly, and that there was but little preliminary discussion
of his fitness for election. One or two men did attempt to agitate his
probable lack of sympathy with everything the Signet stood for, but the
tendency to hurry the meeting along prevailed. A vote was called for.
Haydock involuntarily glanced at McGaw, for he knew where the strongest
opposition would come from. But McGaw’s face was non-committal as to
future intentions. The hat went around. Haviland and Ellis assorted the
cards.
“Ten red and four black,” announced Haviland, with a groan. The result
was better than Haydock had expected. One of those black votes he knew
would never be changed; but the other three might be tired out, as he
and Ellis had combined to hold at bay every other candidate as long as
Wolcott was in the running.